Reddit mentions of Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results

Hey, congratulations on the promotion! You're going to be fine. Every manager started as a newbie once. I've moved out of senior leadership and now coach people moving into management for a living. Here is some advice I can give, in line with the other suggestions. There are 3 things you have to tackle in this scenario:

1. The integration of the new staff. You need to meet with the new person one-on-one, understand their challenges and help guide them. Your expectations need to be clear, and you will need to follow up with them to continue guiding them until they are up to speed.
   
   
2. The vocal person who is making inappropriate comments about the new person. You need to take her aside, hear her concerns, reflect back to her what she just said (this is important so she knows you listened) and then express your concerns: that a) you function together as a team and b) that if she is not happy with a single person's behaviour, she should first talk to the new person about it, constructively, and if that doesn't work, then she should come to you personally. And that she shouldn't bring it up in front of the group because that is not a constructive way to handle this.
   
   
3. You need to go back to the team as a whole (after the two above conversations) because they witnessed something and they need to know how you are addressing it. You need to discuss what happened in more general terms (don't breach any confidentiality / trust) along the lines that you feel that feedback is very important to the team members and to yourself, but that as a team we have to respect each other in how that feedback is delivered, so that it is constructive and supports the team's working together and performing together. Set your expectations that if there is a problem between anyone they to talk to the person concerned first, and they can come to you if that doesn't work. Get the team to discuss how they will do this, and come together with a "pact" around the feedback process between each other. Tell the whole team that you don't expect negative comments about anyone in front of the group; each member of the team has different strengths and the team will be at its best if those strengths are leveraged. Focus on the strengths, not all the weaknesses, as a team come up with a way to give each other feed back, then hold them accountable to it. The strongest teams have good feedback mechanisms between team-members baked into how they work.
   
   A couple books to read:
   
   (1) Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most (Stone, Patton, Heen)
   
   (2) Mastering Leadership (Anderson, Adams)
   
   
   Here is an interesting TED talk - don't be perturbed by the title. He talks about key character habits of good managers / leaders, that can be learned and practiced.
   
   Hope that helps. Feel free to shoot any questions.