The three things every first-time manager needs to get their arms around before anything else — and why getting them in the wrong order costs you credibility fast.
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Are you managing a team for the first time? I'll bet you have some questions. I have answers.
So let's get to your question: where do you start? Start with getting your arms around three things — people, priorities, and resources. Let me walk you through each of those.
People
Maybe you've been brought into this team and you don't know anybody, in which case you need to get to know everybody. More likely, you've been on the team and you know some of the people, but not everyone well. You need to get to know everybody and spend some time with them. Get to know how they think about their jobs, what their preferences are, how they communicate. Just ask them questions and listen to their answers, and get to know them a little bit.
Do it in groups, do it individually. It's really important for them to be seen by you — and by that I mean when you pay attention to what their life is like, what their job is like, or what their opinion is, it's a reflection of one of your priorities: that people matter. They make the organization go, and they're important to accomplishing the work.
You'll learn a lot about individuals when you go through this process of getting to know them better. Nobody's a Terminator robot with a scanner that reads everybody's strengths and weaknesses automatically. But you'll understand certain things about people as you're talking with them, meeting with them.
Some people are reserved, some people are gregarious. Some people are putting their best foot forward because they want to impress you. Others will be a little more aloof and suspicious or uncertain about you and what direction you're going to go. That's all fine — that's pretty normal. Just get to know them and file those things away in the back of your mind as you learn about each of these people.
And as you progress in your responsibility, pay attention to how those things change. If six months from now everybody's wary and suspicious of you, then maybe you haven't done a great job of communicating, or maybe they don't like the direction you're taking the team. But that's a clue — that's a data point you need to pay attention to.
So get to know your people, especially the ones you don't know. That's where you start.
Priorities
Second is priorities. You probably have a general sense of priorities — whoever offered you the job probably said, "This is really important." Write it down, be clear about it.
But as you're interacting with other groups and people, find out what they think and what they know about the priorities. And I think you'll find that not everybody's in alignment on what the priorities ought to be.
Sometimes that's functional — some groups are focused on priority number two and others on priority number one. But there are also opinions: "We should be on priority number five, but—" when you've been told, and you have a sense, that it's priority number five, not one, two, three, and four. So you'll have to deal with that objection when you start allocating resources and attention to the top priorities.
Get clarity on what those priorities are. And if you didn't get a clear sense from your management — if they just have this vague sense that the department's just going to continue doing what it's doing — don't let that just sit. When you have a good sense from your team, and from your own sense of the business, of what the top three priorities are, write them down, sit down with your manager, and say, "This is what I think the top three priorities are." You need to be in alignment with your boss about what the priorities are.
Resources
So: people, priorities, and the third thing is resources. As you take over a department, you're responsible for a budget. You probably have a certain number of engineering or developer hours, or time, allocated to your team, or your tools, space, equipment, access to vendors — all that kind of stuff. Those are all resources for you to manage. Get your hands around it. You have to understand what resources you have to deploy.
As you're talking to all of these other people, ask them, "Do you have the resources you need to do the job?" Well, there's a universal reaction to that: to say, "No, and I need more of this," or, "I need one of these."
At the end of the day, you're going to have a fixed set of resources that have to go against these priorities, and you're going to have to make tough decisions about who gets resources, or where they get allocated. But there's nothing wrong with you interrogating that, investigating that early on, and getting a sense of who's really feeling strained with the resources they have, and where the risks in achieving your objectives might be because they don't have the right resources.
People, priorities, and resources. That's where you start. Thank you.