Making the Most of Your First Three Months as a New Manager
Don’t waste this short window of time when you can play the newbie card to your advantage
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So you’ve been promoted or hired as the newly instated manager of a team. What now?
No matter how you’ve arrived at your new role, congratulations are in order, because this much is true: Somebody — more likely many people — believed in you and your potential to lead a team.
Depending on what got you to this point, different things may be easy or hard for you in your first three months. Your path here probably took one of these four routes:
The Apprentice
Your manager’s team is growing, so you’ve been asked to manage part of it going forward. I went down this path to become a manager at Facebook when our design team’s leader realized that we needed more support after our team doubled. Suddenly, my peers were now my direct reports.
What to take advantage of
This is usually the easiest way to transition into being a manager. Because your manager has been looking over the team and knows everyone involved, you’ll typically have more guidance than in the other transition scenarios. Questions to discuss with your manager include:
- How will my transition be communicated?
- What do I need to know about the people I’ll be managing?
- What does success look like in my first three and six months?
- How can the two of us stay aligned on who does what?
You have a sense of what works and what doesn’t. A useful exercise to go through at the beginning of your transition is to sit down and make a list of all the things that are awesome and all the things that could be better. This list gives you the start of a plan for what you should and shouldn’t change.
What to watch out for
It can feel awkward to establish a new dynamic with former peers. Before, you were just another individual contributor on the team. Now, you are the boss, which means your relationship with teammates might feel altered. When I started, here’s what I found…
