Becoming a manager for the first time is a significant career milestone. It brings a mix of emotions that range from excitement, confidence and eagerness on one side, to nervousness, fear, and anxiety on the other.

The biggest challenge for most new managers is they rarely receive any management-specific training prior to stepping into their new role. New managers are usually high-performing individual contributors that get promoted into a leadership role. Unfortunately, just because you’re a star performer in your individual role doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be a superstar manager. Leading people requires a different set of skills, and if you don’t have a game plan of how to develop those abilities as a manager, you’re setting yourself up for a difficult transition.

In particular, there are four primary conversations that first-time managers should be equipped to have with their people:

1. Goal setting conversations – Ken Blanchard likes to say that all good performance starts with clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve arrived? Effective goal setting tends to be one of the weakest skills of most managers, and for good reason…it’s hard! Mastering the art of setting goals sets the foundation for good performance.
2. Praising conversations – When I conduct training workshops on building trust, I often ask the participants this question: “How many of you are sick and tired of all the praise you receive at work?” No one ever raises their hand! The truth is that most people don’t receive enough praise or recognition on the job. Learning how, when, and why to praise performance will help first-time managers get the most from their team members.
3. Redirecting conversations – Sometimes team members get off track with their performance and need some redirection on how to get back on course. Redirection conversations can be tricky and difficult to navigate. They have the potential of building trust, commitment, and enabling higher levels of performance of team members. If handled poorly, they have the potential to erode trust, destroy morale, and send team members into a nose dive.
4. Wrapping up conversations – Too often first-time managers end their conversations with team members with no clear plan of action. Talking about what needs to be done doesn’t ensure it will get done. Wrapping up conversations with a positive tone and a firm plan for implementation helps team members follow through on their good intentions.

There is much more detail behind each of these four conversations that will be highlighted in our First-Time Manager Leadership Livecast on Thursday, December 3, 2015 from 8:00-9:00 a.m. PST. It’s free to join and you’ll get to hear more about these four essential conversations and get a sneak preview into Blanchard’s new training program for first-time managers.