What to Do as a New Manager: A 3-Step Plan for Your First 90 Days
You just inherited a new team. You're sitting in meetings, feeling the pressure to make an impact. Your first instinct is to find a problem and fix it—to prove your worth.
This is a trap.
I've learned this the hard way: if you jump in to fix things before you have context, you risk looking reckless, breaking a system you didn't understand, or stepping on the toes of your new reports.
Your first 90 days are not about fixing; they are about building a system. You need an operating system to manage the chaos. Here is the 3-step plan I coach all my new managers on.
1. Diagnose Before You Treat
You can't treat what you don't diagnose. Your team is a living organism with its own inputs (requests), processes (work), and outputs (deliverables). Your first 30 days should be a fact-finding mission.
Ask questions: How is the team perceived by others? How do new requests come in (email, Slack, meetings)? How is team morale?
Identify gaps: Is the team using a project management tool? Is there a clear prioritization framework, or is everyone just firefighting?
Understand outcomes: Are stakeholders happy? Do they have visibility into the team's work?
Don't act on any of this yet. Just take notes. Your job is to be an investigator and understand the as-is before you can build the to-be.
2. Build Your Operating System
Most teams are starved for clarity. They aren't paid to navigate corporate drama or guess what their manager wants. They just want a stable environment where they can do their best work.
Success doesn't come from a specific framework like Agile or Scrum. It comes from the utmost clarity on what needs to be done, by when, and by whom.
As the manager, it's your job to provide this structure.
Create a single source of truth: Build a simple, shared spreadsheet (I call it an Accountability Tracker) that lists all the team's projects.
Define the Who: For every single task, there must be a single, clear owner. When everyone is accountable, no one is accountable.
Define the When: Every task needs a Target Date.
This system isn't for you to micromanage. It's for the team to hold each other accountable and to make progress visible to everyone.
3. Secure Small Wins
New managers often feel pressure to deliver one massive, game-changing project. That's a mistake.
If you spend six months on one big project and it fails, you have one data point: failure. If you spend six months delivering ten smaller, successful projects, you have ten data points of success.
Your number one objective is to build trust and momentum. Find the low-hanging fruit you discovered in your diagnosis—the small, recurring pain points your team or stakeholders hate. Fix those first.
Execute them flawlessly. Show your boss and your team that you can handle stakeholders and deliver results. Success isn't built on a single event; it's built on repetition.
For a deeper playbook, check the Manager Augmented book or learn more about me.