Three Star Leadership

Transition to Leadership

Here are three excellent books about making the transition from individual contributor to manager.

George Fuller has written several books for supervisors. His First Time Supervisor's Survival Guide gets top ratings.

The First-Time Manager by Loren B. Belker is another book that gets good reviews from working managers.

Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership by Linda A. Hill is one of the most popular books about the transition to what Hill calls "management." It's also one of the best. This is the first book I ever saw that addressed the transition to a supervisory/management/leadership job from the position of individual contributor. There's good research here.

You're in Charge, Now What?: The 8 Point Plan by Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin is a book about the transition to senior management roles, but I include it here because it includes a number of cogent observations and sets of questions that a newly promoted manager or one assuming a new assignment will find helpful.

The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results by George Bradt, Jayme Check, and Jorge Pedraza covers some of the same points as Neff and Citrin but with an attempt to include new managers as well.

There's an excellent article by Jim Jenkins in SHRM Online called: "Getting Up to Full Speed" and another excellent article by experienced HR consultant Beverly Weber called "Promoted to Management… Now What?"

Here are some questions about transition issues that I've answered on the Great Supervisor site.
How can managers help new managers make the transition from being an individual performer to being a manager?
How do I handle the transition to supervisor?
What makes the transition to supervisor so hard?
I've just been promoted and I'm supervising people I've worked with.