Moving from being a line manager to managing managers can feel like a big leap, and if that’s a step you’re considering or taking now, you can be really proud of yourself! You have learned a lot as a manager already that will help you get started as a manager of managers. In part one of this article series, we identified what will change as you move into your new role as a manager of managers. You may wonder: How do I actually get started?

I’ve got you: In this article, you’ll find a timeline of practical tips, templates, and concrete steps to take during your first three months. You likely need to actively manage your own onboarding, and the timing of the activities outlined below will give you an indication of what to prioritise.

Here’s a quick overview of how to get started in your first three months so you can see what’s ahead for you. You’ll find details and practical steps you can take for each point below:

Month 1

• Get involved in hiring

• Start building relationships with your boss, direct reports, and stakeholders

  • Start actively managing your boss!

• Get the visibility you need to feel confident

• Get to know your teams

• Manage your direct reports as a group

Month 2-3

• Find support & ways to feel good about your new work

• Develop a communication structure and cadence

• Go into delegation mode

• Understand your strengths and growth areas

Towards the end of month 3

• Take a few steps back and assess

• Regroup and plan your next steps

And along the way, don’t forget to have fun! And remember that you’ve got this 💪

Week 1-2

Get involved in hiring from day one

If your teams are hiring, this should become one of your main priorities—after all, you need to make sure that your teams get the right talent in quickly. Get insight on how that’s going and make sure you receive regular updates:

• Identify what roles are open and ask your teams how these roles fit into the longer-term strategy for your teams, and which roles are especially critical.

• Ask your teams and the recruiting team how the hiring has been going, what challenges they’ve experienced in filling these roles, and how you can help.

• Ask to be included as an interviewer, depending on the open roles. When I’m starting to work with new teams, I ask to be added to all interviews for a few weeks to see how the hiring process works out in practice, which is always time well spent.

• Get regular visibility into the hiring. Ask your HR business partner or recruiting team to share hiring metrics with you every week.

  • Critical metrics may include: number of applicants and pass-through rates for each interview stage,

  • Baselines for all metrics should be included. Either your team’s historical metrics or a meaningful reference (e.g. organisational or industry level metrics) will be useful.

Based on your findings, you may want to prioritise work on hiring improvements to make sure your team can fill critical roles quickly.

Actively manage your calendar

Before you start booking a lot of meetings in the next step, set up your calendar:

• Set up your work hours, blockers for child care runs, family time, and other important events.

• Please put in some dedicated focus time for heads-down work (you’ll thank me later). You need to very actively make room in your daily schedule for time to think.

Start building relationships with stakeholders, customers, teams, and direct reports

As you get started, set up recurring meetings with your most important partners to start building relationships and gathering information towards creating a vision and strategy.

• Stakeholders: Identify your stakeholders, set up recurring 1:1s and start building relationships with them. Typically, this list of stakeholders includes: HR/people team, product-, engineering-, customer support and success teams, customers, business counterparts in teams like finance and revenue, and your peers. Ask them:

  • What do you and your teams need?

  • How can my teams help you?

  • What’s been working well in the partnership?

  • What’s been challenging in the partnership?

  • What quick wins can my teams get for your teams?

  • Based on what you find, you may want to consider actively managing stakeholders’ perception and impression of your teams’ work. Find out in this post why actively managing impressions is important and use this practical exercise to fix it.

• Your direct peers: Set up introduction meetings with your direct peers to get to know each other. They will become your primary team, so these relationships are important. Ask them:

  • Partnership between their teams and yours: How has the cross-team work been going in the past? What’s been working well? Where do you see room for improvement?

  • Working as a “first team”: How can we partner effectively at our level to get the best outcomes for the organisation?

  • Feedback: What’s the best path for us to share feedback with each other on a regular basis?

  • Understanding your boss: What advice do you have for me about working for [boss]?

• Set up a regular meeting with your peers as a group if that’s not in place yet, to discuss cross-team issues and work on objectives together.

• Direct reports: See below.

• Your direct reports as a team: Consider setting up a staff meeting or similar conversation between you and your direct reports as a group (more below).

• Your direct reports’ teams: Set up introductory skip-level 1:1s with your direct reports’ reports to check in on the well-being of the individuals in your domain and your managers’ performance. Use an agenda like this one to get started.

Get to know your direct reports

Meet with your direct reports early on and start getting to know them. Actively seek to understand their leadership and managerial style, development interests, and challenges. Some questions to discuss in your first meeting(s):

• Getting to know each other. Ask them:

  • What’s your experience been working here so far? What have you found rewarding? What’s been challenging?

  • How do you like to give and receive feedback?

  • How do you feel about your career progression here?

  • What do you look for in hiring people?

  • How do you hold your team members accountable? How do you hold yourself accountable?

  • What do you value as a leader?

  • How do you assess performance of your teammates?

  • What does success in your role mean to you?

  • What larger opportunities are you interested in? — Try to understand this early on, so you can start delegating to them (more on this below).

  • What do you need from me to be successful? — Some people have a hard time articulating this, in this case you can use either suggestions or experiment together with them to identify what would be most useful.

• How I work: Share with them how you work, what you value, and what’s important to you, as well as what areas you will need their help in.

• How goal and expectation setting will work. If you’re not clear on this yet, let them know that you’ll figure this out in the coming weeks. I recommend starting with quarterly goals, focus on outcomes and results, and let them run with those. Ask them to check in with you regularly to make sure they stay aligned.

• Initial team introduction. See “understand your teams” below.

• Visibility & alignment. At a later stage, you can talk about visibility into work & how they work with their peers (the rest of your direct reports).

What it means to manage managers

As this is your first time managing managers, here are some principles for you to consider and how to think about managing managers

• Lead with trust. Personally, I believe in leading with trust, instead of “trust needs to be earned”. I let people do their job and just make sure that I get the visibility from them that I need to know that we’re all on the same page.

• Operate as a coach of coaches. Focus on helping them develop new ways of thinking, use questions, challenge their assumptions, and support them in problem-solving and decision-making.

• They’re (closer to) the experts. They have domain expertise and are spending their days working closely with the people on their team. Rely on and use their expertise! Ask them for their opinions, be curious and really seek to understand where they’re coming from. This will not only help them feel seen and validated, but also help you really understand your teams and domain.

Gather information for creating a vision and strategy

You may need to define a vision and strategy early on, so I’d recommend starting as soon as you can. As you’re meeting your team members and stakeholders, ask:

• What problem does your team aim to solve? What business need(s) are they addressing?

• How should this problem be addressed?

• What changes can/should we make?

• What are our greatest strengths?

• What are our greatest weaknesses?

Actively manage your boss

You need to take a much more active role in managing up than you may have been used to so far. This includes:

• Get to know your boss and identify their needs. Ask them questions like:

  • What motivates you?

  • How is your success measured? (This will help you understand more about their motivation!)

  • What’s the main challenge that you’re working on currently?

  • What problems do you need me to solve for you?

  • What are you frustrated about?

  • What would help you feel confident that you have a good sense of what your teams are doing?

  • How are you going to measure my success?

  • How do you consume information? (E.g. some bosses hate to read long-form, others love it.)

• Make the most use of 1:1 time. Your 1:1s may be short and/or infrequent. Focus the 1:1s on getting context, discussing pressing issues, aligning on the bigger picture, getting feedback, and creating mutual understanding. Actively own and run the conversation. Separate between pushing and pulling information:

  • Pushing information, i.e., informing your boss and giving them context, should be as asynchronous as possible.

  • Use synchronous time for pulling information and alignment, i.e., getting information from your boss and making sure you’re on the same page.

• 1:1 topics to get you started:

  • Understanding the bigger picture: What’s top of mind for you at the moment?

  • Alignment: What’s your take on the work in my teams at the moment? What do you think we’re missing?

  • Impact & alignment: What are the most impactful areas that I can spend my time on?

  • Understand others’ impression of my teams’ work: What are you hearing from others about our work?

  • Discuss: Include discussion-worthy topics

  • Get feedback: What advice do you have for me?

  • Ask for input: Raise areas where you could use support or perspective from your boss.

Understand what you own and are responsible for

Check with your boss and your teams: Which business metrics, outcomes, etc. do I own? — If those aren’t clear, take charge and start identifying them or proposing them to your boss. This will likely take a couple weeks; check in with your boss on this regularly and ask for their opinions.

Make space for strategic work

Create room in your weekly schedule to work on strategy. You’re likely still gathering information for now, but you’ll need to start processing all this information now and need space to form thoughts about the future. What I recommend to get you started:

• Block the first 20 minutes of your work day, or

• Block 1 hour each week.

In any case, keep Slack/Teams and email closed during this time, and mark in your calendar that you’re doing heads-down work.

Week 3-4

Get the visibility that you need to feel confident

Visibility is one of the most critical aspects of your work: You need to ensure that you know the most important information about your teams, without getting in the weeds and micromanaging your direct reports. Consider your interfaces with your teams, your boss, and the broader business, define what information you need, and make sure you receive it on a regular basis (start with weekly):

• What information do I need from my direct reports to be confident that I have a good sense of how things are going in my teams? — You may start with asking your direct reports to give you weekly updates in a format like this and iterate from there.

• What information do I need from my boss? — Ask them on a weekly basis.

• What information do I need from the rest of the business? — Are there meetings, reports, email lists, or other channels that you can be added to?

• What self-serve information is available? — What dashboards or other data sources can you receive access to? If none are available, consider building one yourself.

As you start receiving this information, actively check:

• Is this information actually useful to me?

• What’s missing?

• What am I not feeling confident about, and why?

• What did I learn about that I wish I’d known sooner?

Give feedback to the people sharing information with you, and iterate with them.

Manage your direct reports as a group

As a group, your direct reports operate at the same level and should own certain results or initiatives that go across their teams. Instilling a “first-team mindset” is really important, which is why I also always manage the managers reporting to me as a group, and not only as individuals.

Define with your direct reports:

• How will we work together?

• What can we expect from each other?

• How will we give each other feedback?

• How will I get input from them, e.g. on decisions that I need to make or that are being made in the broader business?

• How will we work together as a group? What objectives do we collectively own?

I also recommend setting up a regular, e.g. weekly, staff meeting with your reports. This can be useful as a place for you to solicit their input, identify patterns across the organisation, discuss topics that affect all teams, exchange ideas, and run small workshops together.

Define values: I find it useful to run a workshop to define the group values which guide how we will operate as a leadership team. These can be helpful for holding each other to leadership standards, and staying aligned.

Understand your teams

Ask the following questions in order to understand your teams. I’d recommend repeating this exercise on a regular basis; start with quarterly, then you may be able to decrease the frequency later on.

• Get to know your teams by asking your managers and checking in skip-level meetings:

  • What’s the team vision, strategy, and mission? What’s the technical strategy?

  • What metrics, services, or areas does the team own? How are those connected with higher-level business goals?

  • How is the team measuring their success?

  • Understand the team makeup in terms of: All team members, their tenure, levels, and performance.

  • What are “bright spots” in the team?

  • What challenges are they facing? What’s frustrating your team?

  • What technical challenges are they dealing with?

  • If your team has partnerships with stakeholders like product or platform teams: How are these going?

  • How is your team performing against their goals?

  • What does your team need from you as their boss’ new boss? What can you do to make them more successful?

  • What are the team’s values and culture?

• Get a business perspective from teams like HR and Finance. Depending on your level of access, this may include budgets or hiring.

• Assess whether your teams have the right people in place at all levels:

  • Who are the high performers, and how are they supported?

  • Who’s struggling, and how can they be supported?

  • Where are skill gaps?

  • Which roles are missing?

  • Do you have areas where critical knowledge is only held by very few people? And how about the managers, are the right people in the right places there as well?

Week 4-6

Find support

Find people who can support you in your new role, e.g. a peer who you like spending time with, a mentor, or a coach. Many businesses support leadership coaching for managers of managers, I always recommend at least asking. If you’d like to receive 1:1 support, set up a free introductory session with me.

Feeling good about your work

Resist the urge to get in the weeds. Especially in their first few months, many managers of managers are drawn to lower-level work and tasks that made them successful in their previous roles, like reviewing pull requests, fixing technical issues, or lower-level project management. This is perfectly normal, and is common when people move to more ambiguous work. If you find yourself drawn to these kinds of tasks, ask yourself: Am I using this work as a way to procrastinate bigger, more ambiguous tasks? Is this really the most important work to get done?

Find ways to make progress on bigger projects. Some of my clients have been really successful with time boxing, using techniques like the Pomodoro productivity approach, breaking bigger projects into smaller chunks, or creating (and enforcing!) calendar blocks for focus time.

Track the work you’ve done. In your new role, there will be a lot of work that’s not actually “final”, and where it may feel like progress is slow. At the end of any work day, make a note of what you spent your time on, and make sure to track incremental progress as well. Maybe it’s as simple as the “done” items in your to-do list, or a record of everything you worked on. Over time, this may serve as a reminder that you are, indeed, making progress after all, even on days when it doesn’t feel like it.

Week 6-10

Develop a communication structure and cadence

I always recommend setting up a communication structure that you can use as scaffolding. It’s very easy to lose track of everything that needs to be communicated, and this approach helps you stay on top of it.

Start with something like the following, you can use my template to get started:

• Every Friday evening: Update to my boss with weekly review

• Every Monday morning: Update to my direct reports with my focus areas for the week

• Every Wednesday: Stakeholder update to A, B, C

I usually put reminders in my calendar and to-do app so I don’t forget, and use running documents to draft and keep track of those notes.

One note of caution on communication: You will likely be asked to cascade information from the broader business to your teams on a regular basis. Whenever possible, I only pass information to the managers who directly report to me, and ask them to pass it on to their team(s) from there. I avoid directly communicating to my entire organisation.

Having managers own communication encourages them to take ownership and responsibility in their role, means they can tailor messaging in a way that lands best with their teams, and avoids undermining them. The only exceptions I’ve made to this rule are usually with emergency communication that needs to come from me, or messages in times of crisis and difficult world events, where the purpose is more about sharing my perspective. In cases where I do message my entire organisation, I always inform my management teams first, let them know what I’m planning, and encourage them to share their own thoughts with their teams as well.

Get into delegation mode

Now that you have started getting to know your direct reports, begin delegating as soon as you can. You’ll likely have a lot of work on your plate, and delegation is one of the best ways to understand how people work, so this is the perfect opportunity. Delegate projects that align with your management teams’ growth interests wherever possible, check in with them regularly, and review how it went afterwards.

Understand your strengths & growth areas

The skills that got you this far in your career may not take you where you need to go from here, so I recommend actively identifying where you need to invest and what resources you bring that you can rely on. Some skills that are typically highly relevant at your new level are:

• Delegation

• Dealing with ambiguity

• Communication and “translation” skills between e.g. business partners and engineering teams

• Feedback

• Accountability

• Negotiation

• Adapting leadership styles

• Strategic decision-making

• Visionary leadership

• Business acumen

• Technical aptitude

Initiate a feedback conversation with your new manager to talk about:

1. What strengths do I bring that will help me in my new role? — The idea here is to identify what you’re already good at that you can rely on and continue utilising, even in your new role.

2. Which 2-3 growth areas can I invest in that would be the most impactful and bring the most leverage? — The goal here is to find out which skills will be really worth investing into. You’ll have a lot of new challenges to work through as you explore and grow into your new role, so focusing your development on high-impact goals is important.

I’d also recommend setting up at least a monthly cadence of asking your boss and key stakeholders for feedback. Add a reminder to your calendar!

Week 11-12

Take a few steps back & look at the bigger picture

By now, you’ve gained a lot of information. That’s awesome! Now it’s time to make sure that you put it to use.

• Review your teams across. Does the team structure make sense? Are the teams setup for success? What do they need to increase their impact?

• Check in about your team members: Do you have the right people in the right spots?

• Review hiring needs again: Are all the right roles open? Is anything missing, or anything not needed currently?

• Are you getting strategic work done? If not, change that now.

• Assess your calendar:

  • What meetings do I really need to be in? Which conversations would be better in an asynchronous format?

  • Am I getting time to actually get some heads-down work done?

  • Do I have time for the most impactful work?

  • How am I spending my time between work with my direct reports and teams, and work with my peers and the rest of the organisation? — As a rule of thumb, at least 50% of your time should go to working with your peers, boss, and the rest of the organisation.

• Check in on visibility: Do I have what I need (for now)?

• Refine your communication cadence. Check with your reports, boss, and stakeholders what’s been working so far and what you can change.

• Am I getting enough feedback from my peers, boss, and reports? If not, check in with them now on how it’s been going so far.

• Am I delegating enough? If not, what’s keeping me?

• Reflect on your work so far, identify what you can do better, and celebrate your wins. You’re three months in, that’s huge!

Recalibrate & plan your next steps

Your next steps from here should include:

• Vision, mission, and strategy: Take the information you’ve gained so far and work on clarifications or modifications as needed

• Clarifying what success means in your role and which metrics you own

• Ongoing:

  • Managing your manager

  • Managing your direct reports and actively delegating. Make sure to get them growth opportunities.

  • Staying connected with stakeholders & peers

  • Getting and giving feedback

  • Delegating

• Recording and celebrating your wins. Make note of what you’re learning as you go, and recognise what you’re doing well. It may still take time to connect with feeling successful about your work, but with more time, you will get there.

Moving into the role of managing managers was one of the most exciting changes in my career, and I find that this work can be incredibly rewarding. It is a new and different role, but build on what you learned as a manager and apply the tips above, and I’m sure you’ll do great! If you’d like to work with someone who’s been through this herself, contact me to explore coaching together, or hire me to run trainings for your management team.