New Manager First Day

 Actions to take: Avoid computer time on your first day. Spend the whole day getting to know your team instead. Take a few notes here and there to remind yourself of what you learned.

My first major managerial position was head of a branch library for a multibranch system. I had held a sort of shift supervisor position before that, but this was the first time I was clearly "part of management." On my first day, my supervisor spent three hours in my office with me explaining various systems and software, checking things off the list that HR had provided her. Then she left. I distinctly remember the feeling of near-paralysis that came next. What now? Eventually, I had to go out and speak with my new employees because my computer had locked itself and no one had told me the phone number for IT. My state of mind during my first interactions with my new team was embarrassment at not knowing what to do and fear of looking like a fool. 

That pain and awkwardness could have been avoided with just a few minutes of coaching. It is no challenge to impress everyone on your first day as a new manager once you know what to do. Follow these three simple pieces of advice: 1) stay off of your computer, 2) talk to your staff, 3) take breaks to take notes.

1. Stay off your computer: Do not be the boss who shows up on the job, has a conversation with their supervisor, then disappears into their office for the rest of the day after a brief round of introductions. What impression does that make to your new team? At best, no impression at all. More likely, they will conclude that you are just like most other bosses, that you will only interact with them if there is some kind of fire to put out. You will spend 6 to 10 hours on that computer every day for the rest of your time in that position. Take your first day off while you have the chance. This advice stands even if you've got some HR forms or training that you were told to complete.  As a manager, you get to pick what trouble you are in. I'd rather get in trouble for missing some run of the mill safety training than miss out on setting a good impression with my new team. The paperwork will wait.
2. Talk to your team: Instead of spending time on your computer, spend the whole day getting to know your new employees. Your supervisor or their proxy will probably walk you around for 5 minute introductions. During that time, ask each person if you can come back around later and learn more about them and their jobs. Then, do it. Their first impression will be, "the boss said they were going to do something, then made good on it." Fill your day with it. If you've got 10 employees, plan to spend about 35 minutes; if you've got 20 employees, spend a little less than 20 minutes (roughly 6 hours total in each case). Have a series of questions ready, both basic personal information and questions about their work. Have information about yourself ready. Make it a conversation by encouraging a lot of back-and-forth and asking follow-up questions on their answers. Avoid making it feel like an interrogation. Do everything you can to be casual. Feel free to be totally transparent about what you're doing. You can say, "I know that I'll be stuck in my office most of the time most days. The first day is like a hall pass. I intend to use it to get to know you guys a little bit before the routine sets in." 
3. Take breaks to take notes: Periodically return to your office to jot down a few notes on each person. Don't worry about getting all the details right now. You can ask again in the future. No one expects you to remember the stuff you've learned. That said, they will be impressed with the details you do remember. Do not do this note-taking in front of everyone while you talk. That would come off as bizarrely formal. Take notes on paper rather than you computer. It will help you avoid the temptation of doing other things that first day. Once you have the computer running, you'll feel compelled to check your email "just in case something important came through." In the last hour of the day, you can go back to your computer and transcribe your notes if you like.

Your employees will be seriously impressed if you do this. Their thoughts about you will filter up to your boss, who will hear that you "seem really engaged" and "are one of the most approachable bosses they've ever had." It speaks volumes about the lack of managerial training in the world that this is all you have to do to stand out. But it's true. Average bosses assume that they need to learn systems and get training knocked out right away, because that's the first thing that comes up in the HR orientation. Better bosses know that they will be set up for success by spending that first day talking to the team.

The First One-on-One

Actions to take: In your first one-on-one, be prepared to do most of the talking. Spend most of your time on casual, personal topics rather than work. Ask one or two "softball" work questions to build their confidence in communicating about their work. Wrap the meeting by reinforcing the idea that they should talk about whatever is important to them each week.

To be a truly effective boss, the most important thing you can do is build a trusting relationship with each employee. By far the easiest way to do that is through routine one-on-one meetings. Better-boss.com recommends that those meetings are scheduled, 30 minutes, weekly, and rarely missed, with the first half of the meeting spent on whatever they want to discuss and the second half for whatever you want to discuss.

New things are awkward. Do you remember the first time you had to give a speech in front of the class at school? What about the first time you attempted a new sport, like skiing? How about the first time you had to deliver a performance appraisal? 

Your first one-on-ones will be awkward. Your employee may not have very much to say. Despite the fact that you prepped them by announcing in advance, they will not have a very clear idea of how it is supposed to go. For that matter, neither will you if it is your first time doing them. This blog entry will help you get through your first set of one-on-one meetings with the following recommendations:

• Do most of the work: Be ready to lead the meeting for 25 of the 30 minutes you've scheduled. One or two of your employees might surprise you by being ready to lead their half right off the bat. More will have nothing at all when you ask what they would like to talk about. Be mentally prepared to jump right in and take over the conversation and minimize awkwardness. Do not make apologies for their behavior (e.g. "Don't worry about it this time") or say anything else that implies that they've done something wrong. These meetings, especially the first, are about building a relationship. The last thing you want to do is make you employee feel judged right after they stepped into your office. Instead, just launch into your planned topics when they say they don't have anything. 
• Make it personal: In the first meeting, keep significant work topics off the list. Spend the bulk of your time sharing about yourself. Even if you have worked together for years, odds are good that your employees don't know much about you, or they have vague notions that they're not certain about. Potential topics: talk about your work history, how you ended up in your position; share about your family; talk about your hobbies; anything that is both casual and important to you. During each topic, open the door to let them share similar information about themselves by asking questions. (Caveat: you may have an employee who loves shop talk and has zero interest in personal matters. Use your judgment to individualize the experience.) 
• Toss a softball: If you do talk about work, make it a softball question that they will have an easy time answering. Ask about something you already know they have well under control. This will give your employees a chance to successfully communicate about their job. It will show them that one-on-ones are not about playing gotcha. There are no secret traps. It really is just a relaxed 30 minutes to check in on whatever is important that week.
• Mention future meetings: At the end of the meeting, throw in a little light disclaimer. Say that you'll usually have more work topics to cover, but that chatting about casual things has been fun too. Reinforce the fact that they should bring whatever is important to them to next week's one-on-one. Thank them for their time, and that's a wrap.

It can't be helped that new things are awkward. One-on-ones are no exception. The average boss discards new managerial strategies when they don't see immediate results. Better bosses know that there is a learning curve and will stick it out until they are proficient. 

Management is a New Career

Actions to take: Take your managerial development into your own hands. Your industry likely fails to genuinely acknowledge that a separate set of skills is required for management. Spend time every single week intentionally seeking out and reviewing developmental materials. 

Generally in a career, you build skills from one job to the next. The skills from your previous job provide a foundation to help you succeed as you promote. Using an example from my field, picture the bottom rung of the library profession, the shelver. They learn the rules for organizing books and learn parts of the software for checking in, placing items on reserve, sending books to other locations for pickup. Over time, those processes become like second nature. They promote to desk clerk. Here, they get to see the organization process from the customer perspective a little bit. They add to their understanding of the library system software. The get a more complete understanding of the collections, what gets purchased and what doesn't. Finally, they promote to professional cataloger. The cataloger has to understand the system at a much deeper level than either of the previous positions. But it is easy to see how the previous jobs help prepare the employee for cataloger work. There is a direct line from the shelver’s tasks to the desk clerk’s tasks to the cataloger’s tasks. 

Management is not like that. The work you do as a manager does not really use the skills you learned in previous jobs. People get tricked into thinking it does. You're still talking about the same work, so you can get by for a while. You know the details of the work your employees are doing because you did the work yourself. You probably know their work very well--there is a reason you were promoted to management, after all. 

You can get by on that expertise for a while. People are happy to follow you "because you know best" for a while. But it won't work like that for everything. It won't work at all the moment you transfer locations. Those new employees don't know you. They won't automatically trust that you are an expert worth listening to. 

You need other tools in your toolbox. You need to develop your relationship power toolbox. That is what you did not learn in your previous roles. This idea that management is a totally different career, we don’t really acknowledge that. When I say we, I mean practically all of humanity. Yes, people might pay the idea lip service. They might say stupid platitudes about getting thrown into the deep end. But we don’t do anything structurally about this fact. We promote people to management, watch them splash around and almost drown, and say “that’s just how it works” because we had to do the same thing ourselves. 

That is stupid. It is maddeningly stupid. A big part of my motivation to write this blog comes from my frustration that the world works this way. It’s a painful, cruel process that isn’t even particularly effective.

That isn't how it has to happen. What is the typical scenario when we change careers? Maybe you're a teacher that decides to become an electrical engineer or vice versa. The answer: we train, often for years, before taking on that new role. We learn what skills are necessary for the job. We practice those skills before it matters so that we can do the job adequately when it does.

Management is something else, but your career is not set up to acknowledge that. When you get your first management job, you’ll be thrown into that deep end, and there won't be a lot of people coaching you on how to swim. You need to prepare for it yourself. Set aside time every single week for professional development. Find managerial resources: books, blogs, online courses, seminars, everything. Critically assess the advice you hear. And, most importantly, apply it. If you fail to change anything about your work, then the learning is pointless. 

Your organization is not going to do this for you. Better bosses will do it for themselves.