When to just stay out of the way

I’m still pretty new at my current gig and it’s reminded me that the hardest thing to figure out in any new role, especially as a manager, is knowing out how much to get involved, what to change, what to keep, and maybe most importantly when to just stay out of the way.

The last part is the toughest. Maybe if you’re joining a wildly dysfunctional team it’d be easy to justify moving all the cheese, but in a lot of cases you’re probably jumping into something semi-functional. But at the same time they didn’t hire you just to be a layer on top of a perfectly well-oiled machine. Reading between the lines and deciding when to jump in and when to let the team keep rolling is hard!

Let’s also acknowledge that since you’ve just been hired, your ego/fears are on full blast, sitting on your shoulders and telling you that you have to show “value”. But that’s the trick isn’t it, because in your first few months the very thin line between doing things and doing actually valuable things is quite hard to see. You could go the nuclear version and just do all the things and hope that you’ve got it right, but that can backfire badly.

All that to say, I’ve been doing this EM thing for a while now and I’m still like maybe 60% sure that I’m kinda sorta doing it right. There are a wild number of variables at play — company culture, the work itself, industry upheavals, humans and their personalities, your own baggage, and about 10,000 other subtleties to figure out.

So if you’re transitioning into a new role, just know that we see you and recognize it’s hard. In an ideal scenario you have really lovely, supportive teammates who help you figure it out day to day. But also talk to your peers, lean on your manager, and actively collect feedback from the folks you work with. That’s about the best “strategy” that I’ve come up with to date.