Before You Manage Anything, Know Who You’re Managing

In the prior overview post on becoming a new manager, the first principle is simple: before you change anything, sit down with everyone on your team and find out not just what they do, but what they want for their future.

It’s simple to state. It’s not always simple to do well — and it’s worth slowing down on, because almost everything else you do as a new manager depends on getting this one right first.

Why This Comes Before Everything Else

Here’s the thing most new managers don’t realize until they’re a few months in: you were not hired to manage tasks. You were hired to manage people who do tasks. That distinction sounds obvious, but it changes the entire order of operations. If you start with process — how work gets assigned, how meetings run, how decisions get made — before you understand the people executing that process, you’re optimizing a system you don’t actually understand yet.

There’s also a quieter reason this matters, and it has nothing to do with process at all. Whether or not it’s written into anyone’s job description, most employees experience their manager as the person responsible for their career. Not their whole career — but the visible, immediate part of it: whether they get stretch opportunities, whether their work gets seen by the right people, whether someone’s advocating for them when decisions get made in rooms they’re not in.

If you don’t explicitly claim that role, your team will assume it’s yours anyway — silently, and often incorrectly. Someone might assume you already know they want to move into a technical lead role, when you don’t. Someone else might assume you don’t care about their growth at all, simply because you never asked. Both of those assumptions are corrosive, and both are avoidable with one conversation.

What the Conversation Actually Looks Like

Set up time with each person individually — not a team meeting, not a group lunch. Somewhere private, somewhere uninterrupted, ideally not your first week wearing a suit of authority you haven’t earned yet.

Ask two different kinds of questions, and don’t collapse them into one:

How they’d describe their day-to-day. Something like: “Can you help me understand your day-to-day — including what energizes you, and what you’d want to hand off if you could?” Notice the framing: you’re asking them to help you understand. We are not asking them to account for their time. It’s a small shift in language, but it changes who the conversation belongs to. You’ll be surprised how often the real picture doesn’t match what you assumed from the outside. You only get the real picture if the question sounds like curiosity, not evaluation.

What they want. This is the harder question, and the one people are least used to being asked sincerely. A useful way in: What does success look like for you in six months? In a year? Then work backward together — what would need to happen between now and then, in what order, on what rough timeline.

Some people will have a ready answer. Plenty won’t — and that’s fine. The goal of the first conversation isn’t to walk out with a finished plan. It’s to open a door that most people have never had opened for them by a manager before, and to signal, credibly, that you intend to keep it open.

The Mistake to Avoid: Turning This Into a Performance Review

It’s tempting to treat these first conversations as a chance to assess your team — who’s strong, who’s weak, who agrees with your read on the department. Resist that. If people sense they’re being quietly evaluated, they’ll give you the answer they think you want, not the real one, and you’ll have learned nothing true about anyone.

The tone you want is closer to curiosity than evaluation. You’re not deciding anything yet. You’re gathering the information you’ll eventually need to make good decisions — decisions about who gets which project, who’s ready for more, who needs something different from what they’re currently getting. None of that works if the input you collected was performance, not truth.

Where This Pays Off Later

This isn’t a one-time exercise you check off and move past. What you learn in these first conversations becomes the foundation for the weekly check-ins in the next stage. The difference between a check-in that’s just a status update and one that’s actually building toward something the person cares about. It’s also what makes you credible later, when you do eventually make changes: a team that already believes you understand what they’re working toward gives you far more benefit of the doubt than one that’s still wondering whether you know their name.

You can’t mentor, advocate for, or advise someone toward a destination you never asked about. This is where that starts.

See you at the after party,

Ringo “HRNasty” Nishioka

nasty: an unreal maneuver of incredible technique, something that is ridiculously good, tricky, and manipulative but with a result that can’t help but be admired. A phrase used to describe someone good at something. “He has a nasty forkball”.

Ongoing writing and context live on LinkedIn.

**Did this article change how you see career decisions?**

Get Career Reality Updates from the other side of the management table.

Ringo Nishioka writes about how executives and managers actually make decisions about your career inside organizations.