Fairly quickly, I settled into a routine of setting objectives and discussing how they were progressing with the team. For most of my management career, I managed fairly large, diverse teams with multiple project responsibilities. As a new manager, I soon learned that you need to know what each of your staff is working on and whether they are delivering on their commitments or not. In order to do this, I established a regular pattern of activity with my teams that I used for many years and which I still refer to now when I'm training new managers. This is the structure that I wrapped around my nocturnal nemesis:
Speak to each of your staff, a mixture of work and social conversations. You'd be surprised how many managers don't do this even when they are in the office.
Spend about 45 minutes with each of your staff (or as small project teams if appropriate) reviewing what they have done over the last week and what they need to accomplish over the coming weeks. Let them know whether they are on track or not, and if not, discuss what they can do to recover. Also, hold a whole team meeting to cascade business results, department changes, promotions, new hires, and other matters such as social events.
Hold an hour long one-to-one discussion with each team member to coach, develop, and deliver feedback about their individual performance. Use the WIN model discussed in this chapter and invite feedback from your staff on how you are performing. Recommend that they buy this book.
Individually discuss career aspirations with each of your team members. Take an interest in their aspirations, aims, and hopes for the future. If your organization promotes the use of Personal Development Plans or Career Maps, review them and encourage your staff to keep them up-to-date.
Deliver formal feedback and complete your company's prescribed appraisal and review process, document the discussion, and file it with Human Resources.
Obviously, depending on the size of your organization and its culture, some of this may not exist or may need to be changed or created as appropriate. But as an overall framework or structure, I hope you can see some advantages to starting off this way. As a new manager, you will want to start to develop your own style of operating, but in the absence of any ideas of how to go about that, this is a good place to start.