✦Teams · 13 records · for a shared workspaceManage a team

New managers usually keep doing their old job and fit the management around it. This inverts that on purpose — the one-to-ones and the clarity about what the team is for come first, because they are the parts only you can do.

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✦ Everything it creates

The whole plan, before you install it

Goal

Be a manager the team would keep Month 3

One-to-ones running, the team's purpose written down, one thing delivered.

The people Week 4

The only work that is genuinely yours rather than inherited.

  • Book recurring one-to-ones with everybodyDo firstDay 5
  • Ask each person what they want from the next yearDo firstWeek 3
  • Write down what I heard, and what I will do about itWeek 4

The work Month 3

What the team is for, and one thing that proves it.

  • Write down what this team is measured onDo firstWeek 2
  • Agree the one thing we will deliver this quarterDo firstWeek 4
  • Deliver itMonth 3

Routines

  • One-to-onesweekly
  • Write down what I noticed about the teamweekly
Skills
  • Managing peopleBeginner → Intermediate

    Log the time spent coaching and giving feedback. It is the part of the job that feels least like work and improves slowest without attention.

✦ It comes with a note

The people half comes first

New managers keep doing their old job and fit the management around it. That is the wrong way round: one-to-ones and clarity about what the team is for are the parts only you can do.\n\nOne-to-ones are worth more for being reliable than for being long. Cancelled twice in a row and they stop being a place anybody raises anything.

✦ Questions

Manage a team, answered.

Start one-to-ones, and find out what each person actually wants from the next year. It is the only work that is genuinely yours rather than inherited, and it gets harder to start the longer the team goes without it.
Weekly or fortnightly, and never cancelled twice in a row. The value comes almost entirely from the reliability rather than the content — a meeting that gets moved whenever something urgent appears stops being a place anybody raises anything.
Less of it than feels comfortable. The plan asks for exactly one delivered thing so there is a real answer to that question, rather than a quarter of doing both badly and calling it a transition.
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