Where a first-time manager should put their attention
Five members of the Executive Coaching work group on delegation, 1:1s, objectives and the first hard conversation.
Updated
Your scorecard moves from your own work to what the team produces, so the early job is setting clear outcomes, handing problems back with questions and helping your reports work with each other directly.
- Your own output stops being the measure. Julie Zhuo judges a new manager by the team's results, through purpose, people and process. Yue Zhao tells new managers to plan for a productivity dip in month one, and Christina Wodtke sees new managers micromanage because they fear nothing will happen if they stop giving orders.
- Answer problems with questions. Christina asks four in order: what is the reality, what are the options, what are the pros and cons, and what will you try next. Over time, reports get better at working through problems without the manager.
- Set one objective. Christina gives a team one objective per quarter. Julie wants outcomes clear enough that everyone agrees afterward whether the work succeeded, and Elena Luneva cuts projects that fail either test before they ship.
- Ask your own manager what success looks like. Julie suggests asking what would make your manager feel you are doing a great job. Yue Zhao has seen a VP hit every team goal and still miss promotion because he put his team's needs ahead of the company's.
Group chat with Julie, Cat, Yue, Christina, Elena — the Executive Coaching work group
Question:
What should a first-time manager focus on to lead a team well?
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
Start by deciding which "you" shows up in each conversation. The hardest part of the first manager role is relational. Yesterday you were a peer, and today you might be a peer in one meeting, a coach in a 1:1, and the person making the call in a planning review. When new managers don't name that stance, their team can't tell whether "what do you think?" is an invitation or a decision already made. I coach leaders to pick the stance on purpose before each interaction.
Second, make yourself easy to work with. Write a short manager "user manual" that covers how you like to communicate, how you give feedback, and what you need from people. It removes a lot of guessing from day one, and you update it as your style changes. For each new report, define what success looks like over the first 90 days and use that same window to check how well you're managing them.
Third, run the team on learning instead of status. Move updates to async reading and spend meeting time on what you learned from recent work. Start with low-stakes topics so people get used to speaking openly. Less experienced teams need more structure, with clear next steps toward the level you expect. Expect coaching to be part of the job, since you won't find a plug-and-play hire.
Finally, pay attention to your own discomfort. Moving from doing the work to leading people feels awkward, sometimes physically. Name what makes you hesitate and practice in small, real moments, like owning a meeting agenda, so you aren't relying on theory alone. Leadership looks different on everyone, so the goal is to find your own version instead of copying someone else's. ✨
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial. Author of The Making of a Manager and former VP of Product Design at Facebook
Start by changing what you measure yourself on. As a new manager, your job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. Your own output stops being the scorecard. In my book I break that into three levers: purpose (does the team know what success looks like and why it matters), people (are the right people in the right roles, growing), and process (how the team works together day to day).
Three practical things I wish I'd done sooner:
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Be honest about being new. When I became a manager at 25, my peers were suddenly my reports, and I acted like I thought a manager should: confident, authoritative, with all the answers. People could tell it was an act. I wish I'd sat down with each person and said, "I'm new to this, and I'm going to need your help."
YouTube "I don't know, but let's figure it out together" builds more trust than bluffing.
LinkedIn
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Give work to people's strengths. You won't be the best designer, presenter, or organizer on the team (I was none of these). Let the best visual designer set the type guidelines and have the best presenter show off the team's work.
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Model the behavior you want. If you want the team focused on top priorities, don't schedule a wall of recurring meetings. If you want excellence, be the first to call out sloppy work. If you want growth, be the first to share what you learned.
Substack
Cat's 90-day success definition for each report works upward too. Your first three months are when naive questions are welcome, so ask your own manager what success looks like for you at three and six months.
Medium
One check before any of this: imagine a full day of back-to-back 1:1s. If that sounds awful, management will be an uphill slog, because most of the job is people.Medium
Yue ZhaoExecutive coach and author of The Uncommon Executive. Former Chief Product & Technology Officer at Fuzzy
Most first-time managers set up one routine for everyone: a weekly team meeting, a few stand-ups, and weekly 1:1s for every report, because it feels fair and simple. That setup breaks fast. The weekly meeting gets too in the weeds for your senior people, and a standing 1:1 is too high level for someone stuck on a messy 0-to-1 project.
Cat's point that less experienced teams need more structure goes further than that. Match how you manage to the person and the kind of work.
news.theuncommonexecutive
✅ Run well-defined, repeatable tasks (shipping features, triaging tickets) through group check-ins once or twice a week. Early-career folks get quick redirects that way, and they learn from each other.
✅ For strategy or cross-org work that runs over weeks or months, use 1:1s and leadership reviews. Your job there is to guide, coach, and unblock. Dictating tasks to that work slows it down.
✅ Get out of execution yourself. Being in the weeds feels like helping, but your real job is to find the biggest opportunities for your team's impact and protect time for that thinking. Strategic time is required from day one. You don't earn it after the operational work is done.news.theuncommonexecutive
✅ Give your team agency. At Meta and Fuzzy I learned that when I asked teams to follow the rules without question, I got incremental wins and more of the status quo. So in 1:1s I started asking, "Is this a good case for an exception?" I also told the team how I had pushed for exceptions and won them.
On Cat's discomfort point, letting go was the hardest part for me. I didn't really learn to delegate until I had a kid and physically couldn't do everything myself.
Apple Podcasts
Bottom line? You'll feel less productive for a while because you're no longer the one doing the work. Plan for that dip in month one.
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
Julie's "I'm new to this, and I'm going to need your help" only works if you set up a way for that help to reach you. Before frustrations pile up, agree with each person on how and when you'll trade feedback in real time. In my coaching work, the relationships that sour fastest are the ones where small irritations go unspoken for months and then come out all at once. Opening with your own development work, including what you're struggling with, makes it easier for the other person to do the same.
Second, track energy along with output. I use a simple "battery level" check with leaders: which tasks drain you, which give you energy, and the same questions for each person on your team. New managers often hold onto the IC work that energizes them and push the draining work to the end of the day, and the team picks up on that. Seeing it written down tells you what to delegate, what to protect, and who is running low before it turns into burnout.
Julie's back-to-back 1:1s test is a good gut check, and the battery check tells you which parts of the job to build support around. 🙏
Christina WodtkeLecturer at Stanford University and author of Radical Focus. Former General Manager at Zynga
Your first job is to accept that you have a new job.
Most new managers think management means telling people what to do. They're afraid that if they stop, nothing will happen. So they micromanage. Managing is a different job from individual contribution. You're a coach, a facilitator, and the person holding the vision, and all of that starts with trusting your people.YouTube
In practice, when someone brings you a problem, resist solving it. Solving it makes you the bottleneck. I walk them through questions instead:
- What's the reality? What do you know, and what have the tests shown?
- What options do you see?
- What are the pros and cons of each?
- So what are you going to try next? Let me know how it turns out.
Over time they get better and more resilient at working through problems without you.
Spotify
Second, set team norms together. Then check them every week with a five-minute retro: "How did our experiment go, and what's next week's experiment?" Because the retro is so lightweight, small tensions like "can we start on time?" get raised before they turn into conflicts. Review the whole list each quarter.
mindtheproduct
Third, write real role descriptions and keep using them after the hire. A job description grabbed off the internet leads to bad interviews and fuzzy expectations later.
If you only do one thing, have your team write its own norms. Once people get used to having some control, they start acting differently. And hold a Friday celebration where everyone brags about what they shipped that week, with beer or cake. Sometimes just treating people like humans is the first step toward a high-performing team.YouTube
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial. Author of The Making of a Manager and former VP of Product Design at Facebook
Yue's productivity dip is real, and it gets worse if the new manager quietly sets up the team as hub and spoke, with every decision and every critique routed through them. That was one of my early lessons. A team works when the designer on the ground can get critique and partnership from another designer directly, without me in the middle. So part of the job is to deliberately build the relationships between your reports, and then ask each person how those cross relationships are going, since you won't see most of them yourself.YouTube
Molly Graham, who was also a leader at Facebook, calls this "giving away your Legos." The work you were great at as an IC is exactly what's hardest to hand off, and handing it off is what frees you for the purpose work Yue describes.YouTube
Delegation only works if the "why" is clear. I push teams to define absolutely unambiguous outcomes: after the work ships, everyone would agree on whether it succeeded. "Users will have a clearer mental model" fails that test (I have said those exact words about many a redesign). "People will use the product more frequently" passes.LinkedIn A first-time manager who gets this right can hand off the "how" with confidence, because the team and the manager will judge the result the same way.
Yue ZhaoExecutive coach and author of The Uncommon Executive. Former Chief Product & Technology Officer at Fuzzy
Most new managers copy the one manager they remember. On a podcast, Andrew described how it usually goes: either you loved a hands-off boss and promise to be just like them, or a micromanager burned you and you swing to the opposite extreme. The catch is that you only ever saw one side of that manager, with one version of yourself at one point in time. I was lucky to have amazing managers at Meta. Still, when I ask people who worked for those same managers, they describe a very different leader, and that surprises me every time.Apple Podcasts
So don't pick a style ahead of time. Christina's question sequence gives you a middle ground between hands-off and micromanaging. Sue Bethanis adds a useful point: the questions you choose to ask also show what you think is important. Ask coaching questions about a priority and the person learns it matters. You get accountability and urgency without hovering.LinkedIn
Watch your altitude too. One of my clients, a VP running hundreds of people, hit every team goal and still got passed over for promotion twice in two years. He put his team's needs ahead of the company's. He also took other functions' needs into account without ever building them into his plans. First-time managers develop this habit early because protecting your team feels like good leadership. Start asking what the company needs from your team, then work back to what your team needs.
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
Christina's four questions are the right default, and I'd pair them with one habit: say which mode you're in before you start. Sometimes a new manager does need to be directive, for example with a launch deadline tomorrow or a call only you can make. Problems come when you ask coaching questions while you already have an answer in mind, because people feel tested instead of trusted. Saying "I'm going to coach you through this one" or "This one's my call, here's why" keeps the questions honest.
Adjust how much you hand back based on experience. A senior person can take "What are you going to try next?" and run with it. Someone earlier in their career often needs smaller steps first, like "Bring me two options with pros and cons by Thursday," and then more room once they've done that a few times. Leaving all of the problem-solving to someone who doesn't have the steps yet feels like being abandoned, even if you meant it as trust.
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial. Author of The Making of a Manager and former VP of Product Design at Facebook
Yue's altitude problem has a cheap fix: ask your own manager how they see success. In your next 1:1, try "What makes you feel you're doing a great job in your role?" and then "What would make you feel I'm doing a great job?" The number of people who have asked me the first question in my whole career, I can count on one hand. The answers tell you what the company needs from your team before you plan anything, and they give you a shared goal to build trust on before any evaluation starts.LinkedIn
The same move works downward when you give your first piece of hard feedback, which is the conversation new managers dread most. Lead with your intent so the person hears why you're saying it: "I think you're great at these parts of the job. I want to help you be even more impactful, and here's something I see that may be holding you back." People take feedback very differently once they believe you're on their side.Apple Podcasts
Yue ZhaoExecutive coach and author of The Uncommon Executive. Former Chief Product & Technology Officer at Fuzzy
One gap so far is making your team's work visible above you. Doing great work inside the team doesn't count for much if leadership never sees it, and as a new manager you're now the main channel for that.
Bragging always felt awkward to me, so I share wins as learnings. I run lunch-and-learns and talk at team meetings about what we learned from our successes and failures. Examples include cross-functional collaboration best practices and how we launched a new product. Credit the person who did the work by name. That way your team's work travels across the org, and nobody has to toot their own horn.
Also write the year-end review in January. I once sat down to write my self-review and realized I'd over-delivered on execution and under-delivered on strategy and cross-team impact, and by then it was too late to fix. Draft your team's version now: what you want leadership to say about the team in 12 months, and which leaders need to see the work. Then check it against Julie's unambiguous outcomes every quarter. When review season comes, you're advocating for your reports with evidence you planned for, which beats scrambling for it in December.
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
For that first hard feedback conversation, Julie's script helps most when you're calm enough to use it. New managers usually walk in rehearsed, and then the person pushes back and they rush to get through it. Your body tends to notice first: shallow breathing, a tight jaw, the urge to keep talking. I coach leaders to take that urge to push through as a reason to slow down. Saying "Let me think about that and come back to you tomorrow" is a perfectly good leadership move, and it beats a rushed answer you'll have to walk back.
A few minutes of reflection or journaling before the day starts makes that easier. If you go straight from waking up to Slack, you spend the whole day reacting. Ten minutes deciding what matters today, including which conversation you need to show up well for, gives you a plan before everyone else's requests arrive.
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial. Author of The Making of a Manager and former VP of Product Design at Facebook
One more lens for spotting who on your team is ready for more room, which connects to Cat's point about how much to hand back. I think of it as a ladder of ownership, using a meeting that isn't working as the example:
- Judging ("this meeting is a waste")
- Gossiping
- Giving feedback
- Giving deep feedback
- Collaborating
- Driving
- Owning: volunteering to help plan and run the meeting, gathering suggestions, and iterating until it's consistently a good use of everyone's time
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A first-time manager can use the ladder two ways. When a report complains, ask what it would take to move them one rung up, from judging to giving specific feedback, or from collaborating to driving. When someone is already at levels 6 or 7, they're the person to give real ownership to, and that frees your time for the strategic work Yue says can't wait. People at the top of the ladder are the ones the team already treats as leaders, and they're often your future managers.X
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
Practice the hard conversations before you have them for real. In my coaching sessions with new leaders, we roleplay the first underperformance talk, the "I'm now your manager" conversation with a former peer, or pushing back on their own boss. Saying the words out loud once, at low stakes, shows you exactly where you freeze or start over-explaining, and you can fix that before it counts. A peer manager or a mentor can play the other side.
Name what's making you hesitate, too. Often the hesitation comes from imposter syndrome: you got promoted for being good at the work, and now you're being judged on something you've never done. Many new leaders find it helps to treat what makes them different as a strength they lead from. Trying to sound like the manager they think they should be usually doesn't work, which is the act Julie described at 25. 💕
Christina WodtkeLecturer at Stanford University and author of Radical Focus. Former General Manager at Zynga
Julie's unambiguous-outcome test gets harder as the list grows. New managers usually hand their team five priorities because every one of them feels important. My rule for OKRs is one objective per quarter for the team. Never set them per person, and use at most two levels: the business OKR and the team OKR. If you settle on two, at least you aren't at five or twelve. Every objective you add takes away some of people's ability to focus on the strategic work.YouTube
A goal still isn't a strategy, so a new manager can't install OKRs and call the job done. First sit down with your own leadership and work out what you're actually doing and how you'll get there. Julie's "what would make you feel I'm doing a great job?" is a good way to open that conversation. Then write the OKR. That conversation is also the fix for the trap Yue's VP client fell into. Your team's objective starts from what the company needs from your team, so you can't hit every team goal while the business gets nothing it wanted.YouTube
Picking one objective also helps with the delegation Julie and Yue describe. When a report brings you a decision, you can ask "does this move our one objective?" and let them answer it. Otherwise they have to guess which of your five priorities you secretly care about most.
Elena LunevaChief Product & Technology Officer at Madison Reed. Former Chief Product Officer at Braintrust
Julie's point about not seeing most of the cross relationships yourself is why I'd give a first-time manager a fixed 1:1 agenda. Without one, 1:1s slide into status updates that could have been a Slack message.
I inherited a fast-scaling team at Nextdoor that was stuck in decision fatigue. The structure that fixed it came from the C-suite there: People, Process, Product, plus "On My Mind."Substack
- People goes first. I ask who they want to thank, who is getting in their way, and how they are doing. Your reports need engineering, design, and marketing to ship, so these two questions show you the relationships you can't see. You find blockers early and learn whose work deserves a thank-you, and a thank-you from someone outside their reporting line lands hard.
- Process comes second. I ask what feels broken and whether our metrics are leading indicators or vanity metrics. At Nextdoor, small fixes that came up this way, like cutting redundant syncs and clarifying ownership, added up over time.
- Product comes last, because by then you're usually aligned on the backlog. Use that time on the biggest bets and the unknowns.
There's one more skill new managers rarely get told about, and I call it being the editor. Now that AI lets a team ship almost anything, someone has to decide what's worth shipping. If the manager's judgment is soft, everything ships and nothing fits together, and the product turns into one long "more" menu. Christina's single objective gives you the filter: when a project doesn't move that one objective, or can't pass Julie's unambiguous-outcome test, cut it before it ships.Substack
The leaders I'd follow to another company share one trait. People grow faster under them, because they put each person where that person can move the business and they clear everything else out of the way.Substack
Cat LeeFounder and executive coach at Real & Kind. Former Head of Growth at Pinterest
Christina's single objective also tells you what to do with the weekly team meeting. Once status updates move to async reading, the meeting has one job: going over what the team learned that week about moving that objective, including what to try differently. Starting with low-stakes topics helps a newer team get comfortable raising problems in the room. That way the meeting stays on the objective, and the team gets better at it each quarter.
Julie ZhuoCo-founder of Sundial. Author of The Making of a Manager and former VP of Product Design at Facebook
Cat's imposter point matches my most awkward early 1:1. My report had been a peer the day before, someone I looked up to, with more years in design and frankly more talent as a designer than me. I could tell he was thinking "I don't know what you can offer me," and I was thinking the same thing. I wasn't going to be the best at critiquing his work or teaching him craft, so I overcompensated by trying to look like I knew what I was doing.Apple Podcasts
It took me far too long to see that your value as a manager rarely comes from being the best expert in the room, because the best subject matter experts aren't always the best managers. With a report more skilled than you, your contribution is context, priorities, unblocking, and finding them the problems that stretch them. Ask them directly which of those would help most.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What should a weekly business review cover?
A short look at the same few charts each week, the two biggest exceptions, and decisions with an owner and a date that the next meeting checks.
What does being strategic look like day to day?
Choosing one to three priorities, naming what slips when new work arrives, and getting leaders who disagree to settle on one direction.
How do you handle a difficult coworker when nobody intervenes?
Describe the specific behavior to them early and in private, agree who owns each decision, and bring your manager specific incidents and their impact if it continues. Threats or harassment go to formal reporting.
What should you do when a reorg shrinks your scope?
Deliver inside the new boundaries, offer help with your manager's biggest problem, and tie what is left to business results. After about a quarter, judge whether the role still helps you grow.
