New managers
What should I do in my first 30 days as a manager?
Listen more than you talk. The instinct when you step into a new management role is to demonstrate that you deserve it — to show ideas, make changes, signal energy. Resist it. Your first thirty days are for building the foundation you’ll need for everything that follows: understanding the people you’re now responsible for, what’s working and what isn’t, and what the team actually needs from you. Changes made before you have that picture tend to solve the wrong problems.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Care, Context, Clarity
Meet every person individually
Before anything else, have a one-on-one with each person in your team. Ask them three things: what’s going well that you want to protect, what’s getting in the way of their best work, and what would they want a new manager to know. Listen to the answers. Take notes. Don’t solve anything yet. This does two things simultaneously — you learn what’s actually going on, and people experience being heard before being managed.
Be clear about how you work
People find uncertainty about a new manager exhausting. Tell them early: how you like to communicate, how decisions get made, what you care about most, how you’ll give feedback. You don’t need to have the whole leadership philosophy worked out. Even a direct conversation about how you prefer to work removes a lot of ambient anxiety from the team.
Understand what good looks like before you change anything
Spend the first two weeks understanding what the team is being measured on and why. Talk to your own manager about their expectations. Find out which things are working well and why. The fastest way to lose credibility as a new manager is to dismantle something that was functioning — because you didn’t know it was functioning.
Find one thing to fix quickly
Once you understand the landscape, find one genuinely useful thing you can address in the first month. Something real. Something the team has wanted resolved. Fixing it early demonstrates you’re paying attention and that you’re capable of following through. It builds trust faster than any introductory statement.
Where judgment matters
Thirty days is a guide, not a deadline. Some roles require faster action — a team in crisis, a project derailing. But even in those situations, listening first costs less time than you think and produces much better decisions than skipping straight to action.
By the end of your first month, could every person in your team tell you clearly what you care about and how you’ll manage them?
Start with the book
The Leadership Star sets out all five practices in full, with the reasoning behind each one.