---
title: "Seven Fires for the New Official"
description: "A friend, Mr. A, worked diligently at a trading company and was promoted to department manager within three years. However, upon congratulating him, I found him haggard and dispirited, overwhelmed by challenges and coordination issues in his new role. His celebration turned into a complaint session, and he was considering resignation, highlighting the difficulties new managers face."
author: "雷永军"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-04-15"
language: "en"
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---

# Seven Fires for the New Official

> A friend, Mr. A, worked diligently at a trading company and was promoted to department manager within three years. However, upon congratulating him, I found him haggard and dispirited, overwhelmed by challenges and coordination issues in his new role. His celebration turned into a complaint session, and he was considering resignation, highlighting the difficulties new managers face.

A friend, Mr. A, worked at a trading company, diligent and responsible, and was highly appreciated by the general manager. In three years, he rose from an ordinary employee to a department manager. When I went to congratulate him as a friend, I found him haggard and listless, completely losing his former charm. It turned out that within less than a month of taking office, he faced challenges from all sides, various relationship coordination and unexpected work obstacles made a mess of his work, and he was exhausted.
The original congratulations turned into a heart-to-heart complaint. Mr. A's mood was at its worst. He felt he hadn't done his job well and was preparing to resign. I felt great regret for the enormous energy he had spent over three years of hard work, but I couldn't find words of comfort. Being a new official is indeed difficult! So how should a newly appointed department manager ensure successful tenure?
What kind of person to be?
As a newly appointed leader, the first thing to do is ask yourself: What kind of person do I want to be? Because as a manager joining an organization, the first challenge is understanding and integrating into the organization; moreover, your self-positioning directly affects your work in the organization and whether you can establish an effective organizational structure. Here, pay attention to two aspects:
First, shape your personal charisma. In an organization, a person is a brand; their personality, habits, work attitude, and principles of conduct combine to form their brand image. When Mr. Inoue Kaoru, former general manager of Sanyo Japan, was young and served as head of the manufacturing department at Matsushita Battery Factory, no worker was convinced by this young man, making work passive. Inoue didn't give up; he investigated the workers and found they all liked drinking and had large capacities, often drinking together. So Inoue used drinking to make workers admire his capacity, and then they respected Inoue himself. Through shaping his personal charisma, Inoue won organizational unity and favorable work development.
Second, management should combine with the company's actual situation, and strive to be a pioneer, a role model, and decisive in decision-making.
The so-called pioneer means leading by example in executing every organizational decision, standing in front of the organization, inspiring and guiding it; the role model is especially important in management crises, requiring the manager to have leadership qualities; as for decisive decision-making, a good manager is always good at making decisions, so strive to be a resourceful and decisive manager.
As a manager, when you enter an organization, you should not be a purely personal self, but an actor needed by the organization. Your acting skills directly relate to your position in the organization and the development of organizational activities.
The first thing: Whether a leader can play a role mainly changes with the led and the environment. A leader just entering the organizational system, regardless of personal charisma, employees and superiors often pay close attention to the first thing you do. So before doing the first thing, you must design a reasonable work sequence. Here, pay attention to the following issues:
First, break with the past and look to the future. Because yesterday has passed, it can no longer generate profits, so talking about the past is a waste of time. As a new leader, you have no reason to criticize past mistakes or bask in past glory, but should focus on future prospects.
Second, hold a meaningful short meeting. Meetings are a required course for every organization, but most organizations don't calculate the efficiency and cost of meetings, often spending a long time without a clear agenda. This makes employees dread meetings and makes managers rely on meetings to shirk responsibility. So a new manager might design a meeting procedure as a precursor to implementing new policies.
A meaningful meeting should include three links: raising problems (events), discussing problems (communication), and solving problems (decision-making), and grasp these three links. The first meeting must save time, be practical, and solve problems.
Third, delegate authority. Doing everything yourself is the first major drawback of leadership. Only by appropriately delegating power can you free yourself from numerous affairs, pioneer humanized management, unite the backbone of the organization, and train a group of experienced talents for the company's long-term development.
The degree of satisfying followers: Your promotion to an important position is due not only to your own efforts but also to the efforts of your followers. But note that when you become the top manager of the organization, while repaying followers, you should also maintain a certain control space over them; you should neither burn bridges nor spoil them excessively. Water can carry a boat or capsize it; your attitude towards former followers directly affects the vitality of the organizational group.
Managers are called leaders because they have followers; once they lose followers, it means they can't move an inch in the organization. Similarly, if there are no management rules for followers, the organization may lose vitality and effective communication systems, falling into the trap of maintaining interpersonal relationships.
Leader and manager: To be a manager or a leader? Perhaps this is a question every new official often ponders. I believe that at the beginning of taking office, it is best to strive to be a qualified leader liked by everyone. Because management pursues organizational effectiveness, and organizational effectiveness requires cohesion, unity, and positivity. Leaders fundamentally have influence and maintain a followership relationship with the managed, which ensures the cohesion and unity of an effective organization.
The result of influence and followership is that management information can be transmitted quickly and effectively, and executed efficiently while ensuring quality. This not only reduces management costs but also improves management efficiency. But gaining employee followership is not easy, and the preliminary work is quite complex. It requires three aspects:
First, managers must have strong management ability and extraordinary personal charisma;
Second, managers must have fair, just, and open management ethics;
Third, create informal leadership communication groups within the formal organization to ensure team spirit.
Make good use of the power in your hands: Ultimately, the pursuit of position is the pursuit of power, using the tension of power to influence things to achieve the goal of driving the organization. A successful leader should be, and must be, a person with foresight and insight into the ways of acquiring power.
The basis of influence in the leadership process is power, but it is not about abusing power, because the essence of power lies in holding it in reserve rather than actual application. The use of power by new officials is especially important; mainly do the following:
First, use power objectively and fairly. Let employees know that this principle is always maintained under any circumstances.
Second, remember that the purpose of using power is to not use power. Power is only the organizational system given to managers during management, not something managers can arbitrarily define and command.
Third, in the face of power, reasonably exercise positional power. Use reward power more to motivate subordinates, and use punishment power sparingly; do not threaten or force subordinates to obey individuals rather than the organization in spirit, emotion, or material terms.
In office, govern: "Serving as an official for one term, benefiting one region" has always been the ideal of ancient officials and the people's wish; modern managers still bear this responsibility of "benefiting one region."
Vision: To benefit one region, you must build a shared vision that can unite a group of people and inspire them. Gather everyone around the organizational vision, using its appeal to form the driving force for unity and cooperation.
Interests: Whatever the organization, it is a community of interests. In office, govern; as a leader, you must take considerable responsibility for the interests of subordinates, ensuring they are rewarded for their work and their talents are fully utilized.
Career planning: The organization has its vision, and subordinates have their plans and goals. Managers should let the organization take some responsibility for subordinates' careers, shaping and retaining talent through training and other methods.
Your least favorite subordinate: As a new official, ask yourself: Which subordinate do you like least? After identifying them, ask yourself: Why don't you like them?
Once you find answers to both questions, you'll discover how subjective you are. Actually, the problem is simple: your personality determines that you adopt a task-oriented management style.
You focus too much on employees' work and not on the employees themselves; you prefer strict systems and give up opportunities for individual communication with employees. All this shows that employees do not follow you, and your relationship with employees may be purely work-related, which is not conducive to efficient work completion or organizational innovation. Until one day you find that the employee you still dislike has countless strengths, it indicates that your management is developing towards relationship orientation, and you are gradually recognized and embraced by employees.
A new official faces various crises and traps. As a new manager, how to start work? Superiors watch, subordinates compare with previous managers. A qualified manager is not just about burning these seven fires; more importantly, combine with the company's actual situation, analyze specific problems, and adopt the most effective management concepts and methods.
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