5 things every new manager needs to do

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

As a new manager, leading a team can seem daunting. Here are strategies to help you jump your first hurdles and build resilience. 

At the beginning of this year, I faced a new challenge: leading a team of ten for the first time as a people manager. But rather than retreating from the uncertainty, I embraced it as an opportunity for growth. 

Leading a team is never easy, but I have navigated the challenges that have come my way through resilience, empathy, and a commitment to continuous learning. 

Embracing uncertainty

The first step to becoming more comfortable in my role was identifying problem areas for the team so as to remedy them as quickly as possible. Several elements jumped out at me:

• A dysfunctional team environment, where there was a lack of trust, resistance to feedback, and a lack of accountability. 
• A tendency to work in silos.
• A fixed mindset which meant that many resisted new ideas or improvement. 

To address these issues and lead my team effectively, I focused on five key strategies:

1. Building trust and rapport with reports

I prioritized creating a strong foundation of trust and rapport with my team. Empathetic communication was at the core here, requiring consistent 1:1 meetings, active listening, and a commitment to addressing team members’ individual concerns. My efforts set a precedent of understanding and care, fostering a sense of belonging within the team over time.

Here is how I built trust and rapport:

• Creating an open-door policy: I encouraged team members to approach me with concerns, questions, or ideas at any time, reinforcing that their voices were valued.
• Following through on commitments: By delivering on promises – whether it was resolving an issue or a blocker or providing support – I demonstrated reliability and built credibility.
• Promoting psychological safety: I emphasized that mistakes were part of the learning process and created an environment where team members felt comfortable taking risks and sharing their opinions.

2. Gaining senior leadership trust

Earning the trust and confidence of my higher-ups was equally important. I worked hard to share my ideas transparently and sought their feedback regularly.

This helped me gain visibility and allowed me to learn from their insights and identify potential flaws. Demonstrating accountability and a proactive approach to solving problems further solidified my credibility with leadership.

I demonstrated the trust of senior leadership by taking ownership of the problem by proactively identifying areas for improvement and analyzing its impact. I engaged them in discussions during my 1:1s to share insights and collaborate on solutions. By taking accountability, I ensured consistent progress, setting clear milestones and transparently communicating updates. Throughout the process, I aligned my efforts with organizational goals, incorporating feedback and adapting as needed to drive meaningful outcomes.

3. Active coaching and mentoring

I approached my line manager, peer engineering managers, and senior leaders for additional mentoring sessions to provide me with different perspectives and help me refine my strategies. I learned to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and embrace collaborative problem-solving.

This was especially useful to me when I needed support in fostering accountability in my team without micromanaging. The advice I received centered around using data-driven approaches or leading by example. I made adjustments based on my leadership style that balanced transparency around organizational objectives and regular check-ins. Ultimately, my approach ensured they were in alignment with company goals, improving team engagement and ownership. This method also modeled the kind of growth mindset I wanted my team to adopt. 

Coaching from my peer managers has been invaluable in navigating challenging situations by offering diverse perspectives and alternative execution strategies. One key benefit is understanding how they would approach a problem differently from my own strategy, allowing me to compare the pros and cons of each. While there is no definitive right or wrong answer, hearing different viewpoints has helped me refine my decision-making process. 

4. Fostering a culture of experimentation

Innovation thrives in an environment where experimentation is welcomed. I encourage my team to take calculated risks, explore new approaches, and learn from both successes and failures. 

By framing failures as learning opportunities, I’ve shifted the team’s focus from fear of mistakes to a continuous improvement mindset. This cultural shift inspired creativity from the team. I fostered a culture of experimentation by being explicitly clear with my team during retrospectives. I emphasized that we would try one idea and revisit it in future retrospectives to reflect on our learnings and evaluate how it worked for us as a team. 

This process allowed us to decide whether to continue, make tweaks, or abandon ideas. It created an environment where team members felt comfortable proposing new approaches, knowing they were not permanent and could be adjusted based on collective feedback and experiences. 

Overall, this method made my team more open to each other’s opinions and reinforced the belief that we had the power to evolve based on our learnings.

5. Being open to feedback

Leadership is a continuous learning journey, and feedback plays a crucial role. As a manager, it’s important to remain open to feedback from your team, manager, peers, and mentors. 

Recognizing that this journey is about learning rather than perfection allowed me to view mistakes as opportunities for growth and development. This also meant opening the floor to feedback from direct reports, encouraging feedback to foster mutual trust. For instance, a notable example was when a team member suggested holding feature dependency meetings with downstream teams, even if they weren’t explicitly listed as impacted. By staying open-minded and following her lead, we uncovered hidden dependencies, identified potential risks early, and improved cross-team alignment. This approach also led to the creation of a feature progress dashboard, providing better visibility into execution status and helping us track progress toward feature completion more effectively. 

Reflecting on the journey

My journey to create a more positive and productive work environment has been challenging yet rewarding, and it has reinforced the importance of resilience and adaptability in leadership.

This is not to say that I solved all the team’s pain points – far from it. Leadership and team development are continuous journeys. Inevitably, solving one set of challenges doesn’t stop others from arising elsewhere. However, the experiences and transferable skills from this journey will continue to serve me for a long time.

Through embracing uncertainty, fostering trust, and encouraging growth, my time as a people manager has built up a resilient team. While there is no perfect roadmap to leadership, these five strategies can help navigate the complexities of leading a team and ultimately turn challenges into opportunities for success.

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