Osmosis, Potatoes and Expectations for Your New Managers

I just dropped my daughter off for her freshman year of college. The mix of emotions is vast, but more than anything, I feel an enormous sense of pride in raising this amazing human who is so completely different than I was at that age. For example, she wants to major in Biology and go to Medical School. I was a Theater major and don’t remember much of anything about high school science. She studied DNA and genetics in her high school Bio class. All I can remember from mine is osmosis.

Do you remember osmosis? It’s the movement of molecules from high concentration to low concentration. It’s nature’s way of trying to make things even and balanced. You can see this in action by putting a potato in water. There is more water outside the potato than in the potato cells, so over time water is absorbed and the potato swells. It’s easy to measure (the weight of the potato before and after) and a simple way to show how the concept works.

Sometimes it feels like parenting is a real-world application of osmosis as we watch our kids absorb the world around them. They are there, just sucking everything in, all the things we want (and don’t want) them to learn about.

But…how does this concept of osmosis apply to anything related to Stoke Leadership?

I started thinking about conversations I’ve had over the years with various companies about new manager training. And how there is an expectation that people just know stuff when they become managers.

Like they’ve absorbed manager behaviors over time, basically through osmosis, just by having a manager, being managed, and watching other managers. It’s like we expect them to be the swelled-up potato right from the start.

But it doesn’t always work like that. Managers can be good, average and bad. And your new leaders could have witnessed both bad, good and everything in-between behaviors in their work journey. And unlike the potato experiment where it can only absorb the water, you don’t know what type of information/experiences/impressions your leaders have retained.

When new managers are promoted, and it’s just expected that they know things, there’s a risk that their past experiences, that absorption based on their work life, may not be the kinds of behaviors that are going to lead to long-term success at your company.

How do you set these new managers up for success?

There’s no one best way to do it. But when you think about training for your organization, there needs to be an acknowledgement that everyone’s journey to become a new manager has been different. They may have wildly different notions about what they know, what they need to do, and how they need to behave to be successful.

And those differences need to be considered when you craft a New Manager program for your organization.

We went through and thought about all the different concepts we’ve talked about for New Manager Training over the years and we came up with eleven major categories. Eleven!

Under each category we easily came up with three sub-topics.

That’s a lot of things to talk about.

And we could have kept going.

It was the kind of exercise that made us pause, because even for us (and we do this for a living!), it was astonishing to think about all the tasks, behaviors, skills, and thinking that new managers are responsible for—and those aren’t even their job that they are supposed to be doing.

When you look at your expectations for the new managers in your organization, are you anticipating that they are already a swelled-up potato? Or are you more pragmatic in your approach to what you want them to know and learn to be successful?

We’d love to have a consultative conversation to talk about your expectations and aspirations to set your new managers up for success.