How to Start Strong With a New Manager
What is your first thought when you get a new manager?
For a lot of people, it’s a quick hit of anxiousness, and then the questions start.
- “Do they care about the same things?”
- “Are they going to micromanage?”
- “Will I lose autonomy?”
- “Do I need to prove myself again?”
Those questions are normal. They’re also helpful because they point to what you actually need early on: clarity.
The good news is you don’t have to live in ambiguity for weeks while you “see how it goes.” You can shorten that window with a few pragmatic conversations that set expectations and make your work easy to understand.
This is the approach I come back to:
- Set expectations in both directions.
- Make your contributions legible without turning them into self-promotion.
1) Set Mutual Expectations
Most new manager relationships start with polite conversations and many unspoken assumptions.
That’s fine for a week. It gets expensive over a quarter.
Instead, use the first real 1:1 as a working agreement. Your goal is to align on how to work together.
A few questions do most of the work:
- “What are you most accountable for right now?”
- “What does strong performance look like on this team?”
- “What do you want me to decide on my own, and what do you always want pulled into?”
- “When something is at risk, how early do you want to know?”
- “What does ‘done’ look like for the work I’m responsible for?”
That “decode priorities” angle shows up in Harvard Business Review’s guidance, too: if priorities aren’t explicit, asking thoughtful, specific questions is one of the cleanest ways to get aligned.
This works best when it’s mutual. Offer your side of the agreement as well:
- How you prefer to communicate (async vs. live, level of detail)
- How you want feedback (in the moment vs. in 1:1s)
- How you surface risk (what “early” looks like to you)
- How you handle ambiguity when you don’t have perfect information
Your goal is to remove the guesswork.
And as old as it is, Harvard Business School’s “new boss” advice still holds up: clarify mutual expectations early, or you end up getting evaluated against a target you didn’t know existed.
2) Make Your Work Wasy to Follow
With a new manager, context is thin. They don’t yet know what’s normal, what’s fragile, what’s a recurring problem, or where the invisible work is happening.
That’s where people start to over-explain. They’re trying to be understood.
You don’t need to narrate your day. You need to make the work legible.
Legible work answers three questions:
- What changed?
- Why does it matter?
- What happens next?
A short, consistent update pattern is usually enough. The cadence matters less than the consistency.
A simple structure:
- Progress: one or two meaningful moves (not a task list)
- Risks: what could slip or surprise someone
- Decisions/help needed: where you need alignment or unblocking
- Next: what you’re focused on next
This reduces the likelihood that your manager will fill gaps with assumptions. It also reduces the odds they reach for control, because they can see what’s happening without chasing you for updates.
If you want a related lens, here’s a deeper take on communicating with clarity without slipping into performative “credential reciting.”
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My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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3) Build Trust Through Managing Tradeoffs and Risk
In the first month, your manager is learning how you operate when things get difficult.
These moments are often where trust is built. A few moments moments matter more than people realize:
When something is at risk
Managers can handle bad news. They struggle with late news and vague news.
A strong risk update is calm and structured:
- what happened
- impact
- options
- recommendation
- When you update again
That style of communication is basically “managing up” at its healthiest: Focusing on conversations that keep work moving. Melody Wilding talks about this as a set of repeatable conversations (alignment, boundaries, visibility) rather than a single big, awkward moment.
When priorities conflict
Transitions create competing priorities. Everything sounds urgent. People want answers.Your job is to force the tradeoff into the open:“
I can get A or B done this week. If A is the priority, B will slip. Which tradeoff do you want?”
Communication provides clarity. It also protects you from trying to satisfy everyone and quietly failing.
4) Showcase Your Skills Without Overselling
Most people oversell when they feel pressure to prove themselves.
That pressure is real when someone new is forming an opinion of your work. You want to be seen accurately, and you don’t yet know what they notice.
The way out is to talk about impact as you’d talk about a system change: before, after, and why it matters.
Instead of:
“I led a major quality improvement effort.”
Try:
“We had recurring issues in X area. I narrowed it down to Y, we made Z change, and the issue stopped showing up. It reduced rework and made releases smoother.”
It lands because it’s factual. It’s specific. It ties to outcomes.
A few guidelines keep it grounded:
- Prefer specifics over adjectives.
- Share outcomes, not effort.
- Use “we” for shared wins.
- Use “I” for accountability and decisions you own.
- Tie the work to what the team actually values (time saved, risk reduced, quality improved, customer pain avoided).
If you want a lightweight way to support this without turning it into self-promotion, keep a private running log of “what changed because of my work.” Julia Evans popularized this as a “brag document,” even if the point isn’t bragging. It’s memory and evidence.
If you want a more extended version of this idea, here’s a practical way to track outcomes so you can communicate impact accurately when it matters.
Early questions that come up with a new manager point to something real.
You want to know what changed, what’s expected, and whether you’ll have room to do your best work. You get there faster when you:
- align expectations early (in both directions),
- communicate in a way that’s easy to follow,
- handle tradeoffs and risk with calm structure,
- and describe the impact with specifics, not hype.
That’s not a “career hack.” It’s just two adults making the working relationship explicit.