Beginning Your First Week

Congratulations on your new role! You may have not made the transition into management in real life yet, but in this book you have, so well done. You are the star of this story.

Do you remember your first day in your current job? Perhaps you turned up at the office to discover that everything that you needed to know was documented in easy-to-find places, that the organization chart was up to date, that there was an informative onboarding process, and that building your development environment was an absolute breeze. Oh, wait. No, this is the real world. Instead, regardless of whether you joined the company to write Java, do QA, or to be a Scrum master, it’s likely that you spent your first week muddling through, feeling like an impostor, and worrying whether you’re making a good first impression with all of your new colleagues. Don’t worry. It happens to us all.

Joining a new organization as a manager, or even being promoted from within your existing company, can be daunting. Joining as an engineer is equally scary, but at least you can ask for some bugs to fix while working out how the development environment is put together. You can find something productive to do straight away. When you join as a manager, what should you actually do? The initial feeling of pride that you experienced when accepting the job offer may quickly fade and be replaced with a bevy of questions:

• How should I get off on the right foot with my team?
• How is my relationship with others going to change now that I’m the boss?
• Why do I keep forgetting my pass when I visit the bathroom?
• What does the company expect me to do with my time?
• How am I meant to feel productive?
• What is my output?
• What am I actually responsible for?
• How is my performance measured?
• How on earth can I stop this chair squeaking?

Impostor Syndrome

Often, high-achieving individuals may experience an internal contradiction about their ability, resulting in a feeling like they are a fraud or a failure. This phenomenon is known as impostor syndrome. Individuals feel like they are faking it and that they will soon get found out. If you feel this way as a new manager, then don’t worry. It’s normal. Know that your caution is because you want to do a good job for the benefit of others. You were given this role in the first place because you were qualified for it. Remember that. You will feel more confident with time. We’ll look at impostor syndrome and its effects in Chapter 10, ​Humans Are Hard​.

Depending on the amount of preparation that you’ve had, you may have already come up with a plan for how you’re going to spend your time. But for many new managers, it’s common to feel like you’re just making your job up as you go along, and more importantly, that you’re somehow not qualified to do it in the first place. You may have had a number of managers over the course of your career that each demonstrated different styles and approaches: maybe you had a quiet, sage manager who was better at structured written communication when compared to face-to-face exchanges; maybe you had a bouncing entrepreneurial manager who motivated valiantly but was scattershot in their support, or maybe you had a manager who was consistently never there at all (believe me, I’ve heard stories). What should you do?

Don’t worry. This book is here to help you. We’ll begin by bringing some structure to your first week. Everything that you do in this chapter will feed into the activities that you’ll learn about and master as the book progresses, but for now, just follow along with an open mind.