I had graduated from business school with my MBA, which meant that I was supposed to know what I was doing. But in reality, I was pretty lost.

Target expected me to lead a motley crew of 16-year-olds working their first job and 65-year-olds working their last job before retirement. Neither group had any reason to respect me, and I had zero street cred in retail.

Within hours of setting foot in the store, I realized I was in over my head.

The mid-level managers in the store questioned why the company would entrust the second-in-command role to a 23-year-old kid instead of letting them move into the role. (And to be honest, I wondered the same thing.)

My MBA courses had prepared me to analyze balance sheets, opine on case studies, and give entrepreneurial pitches that could potentially woo a venture capitalist, but it had not prepared me for the eventuality of leading a team of blood-and-flesh humans making $8 an hour who didn’t give a rip about company metrics and profitability.

I made a ton of mistakes in my first year of leadership, and I now realize that many of the issues I struggled with are the same issues that every new manager struggles with.

Fast-forward to today: I’ve had the chance to learn from a decade of leading teams. I’ve explained million-dollar mistakes to clients, hired dozens of people and fired others, led teams through hyper-growth and also through layoffs, facilitated hundreds of meetings, and trained dozens of managers.

In that time, I’ve learned that there are a handful of realizations that can help every manager perform their best.

If you recently became a manager (or you hope to become one soon), here are seven things that will help you orient to your first management role:

1. This job is fundamentally different than your last one

The transition from individual contributor to manager is a HUGE transition in many ways — not least of which is that the type of work you complete changes dramatically.

Corporate trainer Monica Livingston expresses it well:

“You used to be in charge of the work. Now you’re in charge of the people who do the work.”

That’s a big paradigm shift.

• Your success used to be measured by the number of cases you completed in a given day. Now it’ll be measured by the number of cases your team completes.
• Your commission check used to be based on the new revenue you brought in each quarter. Now it’ll be based on the revenue your team brings in.

This means your focus should be on how you can remove impediments for your team. For example, for my role at Target, this meant that even if I rocked a project for my District Manager, if my team struggled to stock the shelves in the hours we were assigned, I wouldn’t be a successful leader.

As a manager, there’s one formula to keep in mind:

Your Team’s Success/Failure = Your Success/Failure

2. The “distractions” ARE the job

When I first became a manager, I was frustrated by the number of distractions that arose each day. Team members interrupted me about everything: conflicts they couldn’t resolve, problems they couldn’t solve, questions they wanted to run past someone.

As I saw it, all of these interruptions kept me from doing my “important work.”

But then I realized that those interruptions embodied the human elements of leadership: empathizing with team members, developing my team, and solving problems.

I gradually learned that those distractions ARE the job. That realization freed me from the stress and shame I had previously felt for not having enough time to do my work.

As a manager, you’re the lubricant for all of the gears spinning in the team’s machinery. Your job is to remove friction — to help your team move faster, communicate better, feel more engaged, and accomplish more.

Your job is them. This is what leadership looks like.

3. Your team’s success is determined by how well you can give feedback

Early on, I had a team member who was talking down to coworkers and treating people poorly.

In past jobs, I would have tried to stay out of his way. But as a manager, his attitude was 100 percent my problem, and if I didn’t do something about his behavior, my team would never reach their potential.

No team can be successful if they don’t hear what is or isn’t going well. This means that — whether you like it or not — you will need to give people a lot of feedback in this new role.

If you hesitate to provide feedback (both positive and constructive), then any bad work will become worse and any good work will go unrecognized.

Feedback is a massive aspect of your new role.

4. You’re not an impostor — even if you feel like one

I’ve felt like a fraud many times in my career, including when I began managing my team at Target. I looked around at the other managers and thought, “All of these people know what they’re doing, but I don’t. Who am I fooling? I don’t deserve this.”

If you’re feeling the same right now, then rest assured: MANY new managers feel like that.

That discomfort comes from the fact that you want to do a good job and you’ve never done something like this before. As you get more days and weeks under your belt, you’ll begin to feel more comfortable. So don’t freak out and don’t doubt yourself. You belong in this role, and you’ll figure it out.

“Realize that nobody knows what they’re doing…Nobody knows exactly what is going on. There are a ton of people who will tell you they know the answers. These people are liars. The world we live in is the result of a lot of brave people tinkering, failing, and succeeding once in awhile.”  -Kyle Eschenroeder

5. You don’t have to pretend you know everything

It’s a common misconception that you should “fake it til you make it” to prove you belong in this new role. I think that’s bullshit.

I realized quickly that team members can sniff out a faker, and there’s a difference between exhibiting some confidence (a good thing) versus trying to fool people into thinking you know more than you do (a bad thing).

Instead of faking it, I’ve found it’s often best to lead from a perspective of confident humility.

Confident humility is having the modesty to understand whether you’re the best person to make a decision. It means learning from others when they’re the expert and acting with boldness when you’re the expert.

“The first rule is not to fake anything. You have to be humble, and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t. You’re also in a position of leadership, though, so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading. It’s a fine line, and something I preach today. You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.”  -Bob Iger

If you respect your team’s knowledge and abilities, they’ll also come to respect yours. There’s no need to fake anything. Employees want to follow someone who exhibits confidence, and they want to emulate someone who exhibits humility.

Confidence generates followers; humility generates disciples. You’ll need both to become a successful leader.

6. You need to relinquish some control

The transition from individual contributor to manager is especially difficult once you realize that becoming a manager often means relinquishing control of tasks, projects, processes, and decisions that used to be yours. That can be painful.

I found myself gravitating toward wanting to do easy, straightforward tasks because that’s what I had done in past individual contributor roles and that’s what made me feel most confident in my abilities.

But as a manager, you can’t stick with the safe, simple tasks. You were hired for bigger things: you have to oversee the entire team’s projects and output. That means you’ll have to get outside your comfort zone and develop new skills.

If you’ve been hoarding familiar tasks, I get it. Almost every manager feels the same urge. But the only way to fully step into your new role is to fully step out of the old one, which includes selectively delegating tasks to others around you.

Delegation — when done correctly — is a superpower. It frees up time for you, develops new capabilities in your team, and helps you focus on more strategic initiatives that will help the business. Start developing the skill of delegation.

“Delegating is extremely inefficient initially and extremely efficient eventually. It involves more up-front work from you to develop employees’ abilities so they can produce quality work at scale.”  -Claire Hughes Johnson

7. You can’t wait until you have 100% of the information you want

Managers have to make hundreds of decisions — both large and small. For the majority of those decisions (especially the big ones), you will not have perfect information. In fact, perfect information usually doesn’t exist.

For example, here are a few decisions I encountered:

• Which person to move onto a different team that needed help
• What strategy to use for storing our Black Friday overstock
• Which success metrics to set for a new project
• Which team member to promote into a management role

In all of these situations, I only had a subset of the information I’d ideally like to have.

You will be put in similar situations. And when you are, you’ll be tempted to wait for more information because it’ll feel like you don’t know enough.

But in most situations, some decision is better than no decision. Your team needs a direction, even if that direction isn’t perfect. And if you try to wait until you know everything, your project will fail.

“The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.”  -Seth Godin

In most situations, you’ll need to become comfortable with pulling the trigger on a decision once you’ve reached 75–80 percent certainty. One hundred percent certainty will be too late.

If you recently transitioned into a management role, congrats! I know it’s tough, but you can do this. Everyone struggles a bit when they get started, but you’ll learn as you go.

Hopefully, these seven tips will expedite your learning curve a bit. 😉