A letter to a new manager

Dear new manager,

Congratulations. I know it feels big, and maybe a little unreal. You got the news on Friday, you have been turning it over all weekend, and tomorrow you sit in a chair that someone else sat in last week. Maybe it was your old manager's chair. Maybe you now lead the colleagues you had lunch with yesterday.

I am writing because I was a unit manager for eight years, and because many managers wish someone had told them a few things at the start. These are mine.

Listen first, for about a month#

You will want to show that you can do this, and the quickest way to show it is to change something straight away. Hold off. Book half an hour with each person in your team during the first weeks instead, and ask three questions. What works well here today? What would you like me to leave alone? What worries you?

Write the answers down. After a month you will have a picture of the team that no handover can give you, and your team will have met a manager who asked first. The only things you change right away are the ones that are unsafe for clients or staff. Everything else can wait until you know more.

If you have been promoted over your former colleagues, these conversations matter even more. Say plainly that your role has changed and that you want the relationship to hold anyway. It is an awkward five minutes, and it gets harder the longer you wait.

The role will pull you towards your desk#

It rarely comes up at induction. Researchers who interviewed 42 Swedish first-line managers in child welfare describe a conflict between what social workers expect of their manager and what the organisation demands, with a growing focus on control, administration and budgets. The managers held ideals about developing and supporting their staff, but felt pushed towards control.

I know that pull. Budget follow-ups, statistics and email fill the calendar on their own, so you have to protect your time with people on purpose. Book it into your calendar before anything else each week, and treat it as the most important task you have.

Be clear about who decides what#

Support and clarity go together. In a survey of 309 child-welfare social workers in Stockholm County, the more supportive they found their immediate manager, the lower they rated their workload, the demand to keep learning new things and their role conflicts, and the higher they rated their control over decisions and the clarity of their role. It is one survey at one point in time, so it can't tell us what came first. It does point the same way as my own experience.

In practice it can look like this. Make a list of the decisions you take yourself, the ones the team takes, and the ones you want to be consulted on. Go through it at a team meeting and ask what is missing. You will change it several times in the first six months, and that is fine.

Lead the way you would want to be led#

Think of the best manager you have had, and what they did. For many people it comes down to fairly ordinary things: the manager remembered what they had said, was straight with them, and showed up when things were on fire.

You can do all of that tomorrow, if you remember what it was like on the other side of the desk. Tell someone you trust what your best manager did. Saying it out loud makes it easier to remember when things get hectic.

Find someone to think out loud with#

Being a manager is lonelier than most people expect before they try it. You can't talk about everything with your team, and your manager has worries of their own. You need somewhere to think out loud.

That could be a peer, a managers' network or a mentor. A large meta-analysis of mentoring research found that mentoring went with a wide range of good outcomes, but that the effects were generally small. The studies mostly compared people with and without a mentor after the fact, so I won't promise a transformation. Even so, I think it means a lot to have someone who has stood where you stand. If you want to read about the difference between a mentor and a coach, I have written about it in Mentor or coach?.

About Sunday evenings#

There will be Sunday evenings when you lie awake thinking about a conversation you have to have on Monday. That is common, and it doesn't mean you chose wrong. Decide what you will say in two sentences, say them out loud once, and let that be enough. You don't need to rehearse more than that in bed.

And if those evenings pile up, if you lose sleep week after week, talk to a colleague or your own manager, and to your occupational health service or a doctor if it doesn't ease. (In Sweden, 1177, the national healthcare advice line, is open day and night.)

You will get things wrong sometimes. Say so when it happens, and tell people what you are doing to put it right.

Warm regards,
Yasmina