
Ask HN: What do you expect from a new manager in an existing team? - throwaway16100
Just got hired to lead a team of developers that have been in the company for 2-3 years on average.<p>They never had a manager and worked in a silo&#x27;ed way, with developers getting assigned to different projects as needed.<p>The CTO&#x2F;CEO want to improve the teams quality, have better processes, etc. This team performs user-visible tasks.<p>What do you usually expect from a new manager? If you were said manager, what would you do?
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codingdave
Get to know the people first. Understand why they are in this job, what their
hopes and expectations are both in the day-to-day, and in the long-term for
their career path.

Understand that all change is going to have a personal impact of each one of
them. Knowing the above will help you know which people will be happy/angry
over change, and you can work with them to help them understand the context of
why changes are needed, and what the future holds.

And don't make change for its own sake. If you cannot justify how changes are
better for the team, the company, the product... then you should not be making
changes.

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zubairshams
1\. Understand the hopes, motivations, needs, barriers faced by the members of
your team 2\. Learn the expectations and objectives set by your superior in
terms of achieving success 3\. Bring your expertise in connecting the two.
Your team wants a manager they can respect. Be aware of your management style
and improve upon it. If your team knows you have their back and can make
things happen they will respect you 4\. In turn, respect your team members.
Set a clear path for their career growth. Nothing sucks more to see a manager
who is too busy sucking up to upper management for his/her own good ignoring
the people who support him/her

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EnderMB
Any time I've had to lead a team in the past few years, I've always done two
things first (bottom-up):

* Get to know the people in the team, learn the overall vibe of the group, and how happy everyone is.

* Get the know the people above the team, their motivations for hiring you, and the tangible outcome of your hiring. You say "quality", but what does that mean? Is quality currently low? Do they feel that they could be doing more in certain areas?

From there, I would typically work to integrate myself into the team before
introducing any changes. If the average person has been there for 2-3 years
they've got a lot of business knowledge that I won't have. In my experience,
most teams have a strong opinion of what they want to do to improve processes,
but there is a business reason as to why they've not implemented those
improvements.

The last time I led a team, I wanted total transparency, so we came up with an
internal list of improvements and we focused on incremental and manual
improvements to processes. Most of the time I wasn't even the person making
the changes - I was picking up the slack so someone else could do the work, or
do something they've wanted to do for months. Our processes improved over
time, and as a result delivery improved dramatically. This introduced its own
problems, but in the grand scheme of things the problems were nothing compared
to before.

All I expect from a manager is honesty and consistency in feedback, so when
I've been in those shoes I've tried to be as honest as possible, and to be as
transparent as possible when my message isn't consistent with what I've said
before.

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EliRivers
I'd want the opportunity for a clean slate. An amnesty; I can tell you about
the state of the project, processes, team, anything and everything, and then
I'm off the hook and doing something about it (or not) is your problem, thank
you very much.

You can only do this once, and you can only do this at the start of your
tenure. It's in your interests to do it, lest you find in six months that your
legs were shot out from under you by the previous administration and you
didn't even know it.

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quickthrower2
Getting to know everyone. Probably one on one with every team member which is
all you listening. Keep things the way they are initially, identify the
problems, come up with a smooth strategy to transition from now to a future
state.

Leave your ideas at the door and assess what is good for the team. For example
you love Gaant charts and were super successful with them at your last
company. Don’t introduce them here unless appropriate and probably not at the
start. Unless perhaps everyone else is asking for them and it makes sense.
What I am getting at as it shouldn’t seem like you are bringing your ideas and
commanding, but you are listening and leading.

You also need to do the same exercise upwards too! What does the boss think
the problems are and how will you address them.

Find out what the tension is between the works and the management. There is
always something!

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president
First, define what constitutes "success" in this team. This may depend on a
combination of the goals of the team members, the leaders (your leaders), the
company, and yourself. You won't figure this out on the first day or the first
week as it will take some time to understand the context and rationale for
different stakeholders' goals. After you get a good sense, ask yourself if
your team is sailing in the direction of these goals. Calibrate accordingly
and don't change what isn't broken. Fight the urge to revert to
tools/techniques/mindsets from previous teams that you might be more familiar
with. If things need to be changed, be VERY sure to have a good reason for it
or you will lose the respect of your team early on. Good luck.

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xfour
There definitely seems to be an opportunity to improve “line of sight”. The
CTO/CEO brought you on for a reason. There exists some goal that those
individuals want you to accomplish and you want to make them articulate it.

Once you know that your job gets easier, you now need to figure out how to get
the team from the place they were to the place that the executives want them
to be, remove blockers etc.

Don’t try so much to quickly enact processes as much as listen to what’s
working and not working currently.

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Rohul24
Keeping transparency for each and every information would go a long way in
helping you achieve their trust.Lookout for tools which can help you to
achieve this.

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ponyous
To listen.

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arif1621
Great communication,good work result

