Your First Days In a New Leadership Role
Dec 16th 2024 / leadership
So, you’ve just got a new job as an engineering leader. Starting any new role can be massively nerve wracking but throw in the fact that you are going to be a bunch of these people’s manager and the stakes get really high. How do you turn up on the first day being the biggest noob in the company but somehow gain some credibility with your team, your peer leaders and everyone else in the company? YMMV but here’s a few things that have worked for me:
Pre-game
Make time to go for a few lunches/coffees with your new coworkers before you start. In priority order: your incoming directs, your product and design peers, your manager. Don’t talk shop, get to know each other. Keep it to no more than 3-4 of you rather than one of those long table new starter lunches where you can’t chat to everyone properly.
Really get to know the product
No matter what it is, become a customer of the product as much as you possibly can before day one. Post starting, dig into how the whole company works - doing some customer support is a good place to start, talk to someone from every team (not just the team leads), bust out your SQL skills and build some dashboards, **deeply understand the company’s key results **and how they are measured. You need to know why customers choose your product, what success looks like for the company and every step it takes internally to deliver that product successfully. That’s waaay higher priority than anything technical.
Tell your team what you plan to do for the first weeks and stick to it
Being a leader is weird because there’s very little precedent for what you actually do day to day. Even though the team might be cautious of their new manager they’ll probably add you to all possible meetings and expect you to take the reins on everything. Mitigate this by being really explicit about where you will be and what you will be doing. Most importantly, stick to it - we’ve all seen that old doozy when a new manager turns up and says “I’m just going to listen” then starts a re-org three days later - don’t be that person.
Actually shut up and listen
Talk to everyone 1:1, sit around the office in lots of different places and earwig, lurk in all the slack threads. Yes, go to meetings but be careful with that - especially if you are senior, your presence is a signal. Also, it’s easy to get dragged in to opinionating too early. Try to be the one asking most of the questions but you will be asked what you think about everything - you are in a unique position of having fresh eyes so your feedback is useful but hold those opinions loosely….and don’t, whatever you do, go on and on about your previous job/company. Everybody hates that.
Help out, accrue brownie points
After you’ve done a load of listening you’ll have heard of lots of frustrations, wants, needs etc. Pick something to help with and get it done. Don’t do anything that is at all controversial or requires some decision making/judgement on your part. Find something that someone wishes was a thing, and do it the way they want it doing. Fix a long standing annoying bug, make that tedious spreadsheet, chase that laptop upgrade for a team member, fix that annoyance that came up in a retro. At Twitter UK, I chased the table tennis table people wanted for the lunch room, at Deliveroo, I got everyone’s employment contracts updated so they had a more competitive number of PTO days - which also later helped recruiting. You get to learn a bit about how the company works while accruing some low key goodwill.
Don’t mess, even if it looks on fire
I hear of so many tales of leaders joining a company, telling the team they are “just listening”** **but then discover something that they believe is a fire and could be easily fixed and diving right in. Don’t do it. Every company and team is different - if it was easy they’d have probably fixed it already. Just listen, help out, but keep your greasy mits off the steering wheel for now.
Alright, hope that helps. I’ll likely follow up with a “what to do in the first few months” post soon.