The First-Time Manager’s Guide to Team Building

Chapter 5. Mismanaging Your Teams

There are two dangerous conditions that first-time managers often fall victim to: overmanaging and undermanaging. Let’s look at undermanaging first.

Undermanaging

Let’s say you have a pretty inexperienced team (both in technical skills and team skills) and you manage them as if they were an autonomous team. This is a major mistake.

Inexperienced team members need much more guidance and direction from their managers or team leaders. Some first-time managers expect their team members to learn everything on their own somehow. There are examples of this being true, but not generally speaking. When you undermanage, you are setting up your team members for failure and frustration. Many managers still blame the team, even ...