Focus on What Actually Matters
Your First Week as a Manager
Experience Level: Early Management (1-2 years)
Article 2 of 9 in the First 90 Days Learning Path
Reading time: 8 minutes
Your first week as a new manager arrives, and suddenly everyone is looking at you differently. Team members who were peers yesterday now wait for your direction. Problems that used to be someone else’s responsibility land on your desk. Your calendar fills with meetings you’ve never attended before.
The temptation is overwhelming: fix everything immediately. Prove you deserve this role. Show everyone you have ideas and you’re ready to implement them.
I fell into this trap hard during my first management role at Amazon. By Wednesday of my first week, I’d already identified three process improvements I wanted to make. By Friday, I’d started implementing one of them without fully understanding the downstream effects. The result? Chaos. I’d changed a pick process that made perfect sense from my limited vantage point but created bottlenecks in packing that I hadn’t anticipated.
That failure taught me something critical: your first week isn’t about making your mark. It’s about building the foundation to make your mark effectively later.
The Paradox of Week One
Here’s what makes the first week so challenging: you feel tremendous pressure to prove yourself, but you don’t yet have the context to take meaningful action. You know enough to see problems, but not enough to understand why those problems exist or what’s already been tried.
This creates a paradox. The actions that feel most productive (jumping in, making changes, demonstrating initiative) are often the least effective. The actions that feel least productive (observing, asking questions, withholding judgment) are actually the most valuable.
My experience onboarding dozens of new managers has taught me that the best first weeks look boring from the outside. They’re filled with listening, observing, and learning—not heroic interventions.
What Actually Matters: Five Priorities
Instead of trying to accomplish everything, focus your first week on five specific priorities that create the foundation for everything else.
Priority 1: Understand the Current Reality
Before changing anything, understand how things actually work—not how they’re supposed to work according to the process documents, but how your team actually operates day-to-day.
Walk the floor repeatedly. Watch processes from start to finish. Notice the workarounds your team has developed. These workarounds exist for reasons. Some are inefficiencies waiting to be fixed. Others are brilliant adaptations to problems you don’t yet understand.
Ask questions like: “Why do we do it this way?” and “What happens if this step doesn’t go smoothly?” The goal isn’t to critique—it’s to understand the ecosystem you’ve inherited.
Priority 2: Meet Your Team as Humans
Your team is evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating the operation. They’re wondering: Will this new manager listen to us? Do they care about our challenges? Will they understand our work before trying to change it?
Have brief one-on-one conversations with each team member. Not formal meetings—just five to ten minutes of genuine connection. Ask about their role, their challenges, what they wish previous managers had understood. Most importantly, listen without immediately problem-solving.
These conversations accomplish two things: you gather invaluable ground-level intelligence, and you signal that you value your team’s perspective. Both matter enormously.
Priority 3: Identify the Non-Negotiables
Every operation has non-negotiable priorities: safety requirements, quality standards, critical metrics, compliance issues. These are the guardrails within which everything else operates.
In your first week, get crystal clear on these non-negotiables. What are the safety protocols you must enforce without exception? What quality standards cannot be compromised? Which metrics does leadership watch most closely?
Understanding these boundaries prevents you from accidentally violating something critical while you’re still learning. It also helps you prioritize when multiple issues compete for your attention.
Priority 4: Learn the Communication Landscape
Every team has established communication patterns. Daily huddles, shift handovers, reporting structures, informal information networks. Some of these work well. Others have gaps.
Map out how information currently flows: Who communicates with whom? When do handovers happen? How do team members surface concerns? Where does information get lost?
Don’t try to fix the communication gaps yet—just identify them. You’ll address communication systems systematically later in this learning path, but you need to understand the current landscape first.
Priority 5: Manage Expectations (Including Your Own)
Have explicit conversations with your manager about their expectations for your first week. What do they consider success at this stage? What mistakes do they expect you to make? Where do they want you focusing your attention?
Similarly, set realistic expectations for yourself. You won’t have all the answers by Friday. You’ll feel uncertain and uncomfortable. You’ll probably make at least one mistake that feels embarrassing.
This is normal. The managers I’ve trained who accept this reality adapt faster than those who pressure themselves to be immediately competent.
What Can Wait
Just as important as knowing what to focus on is knowing what to deliberately defer.
Process changes can wait. Unless there’s an immediate safety issue, resist the urge to change processes in week one. You don’t yet have enough context.
Establishing your authority can wait. Your authority comes from competence and trust, not from early demonstrations of power. Trying to establish authority too quickly often backfires.
Solving every problem can wait. You’ll see issues everywhere. Make note of them, but don’t try to fix them all immediately. Some will resolve themselves. Others will reveal deeper patterns once you understand the operation better.
Being the expert can wait. You’re not expected to know everything yet. Admitting “I’m still learning this” builds more credibility than pretending you have answers you don’t.
The Foundation You’re Building
These five priorities might seem underwhelming compared to the impact you imagined making in your first week. But they’re building something crucial: the contextual knowledge and relational trust that makes all your future actions more effective.
When you do eventually improve that process, you’ll understand the downstream effects. When you do give your team direction, they’ll trust that you understand their reality. When you do make tough decisions, you’ll have the context to make them wisely.
The managers who skip this foundation—who jump straight into action—spend months cleaning up avoidable mistakes. The managers who invest in this foundation accelerate past them.
Your first week is about earning the right to lead effectively, not proving you can lead immediately.
Next in this path: With your week-one foundation established, you’re ready to develop the first core capability: understanding yourself as a leader. Self-awareness is where lasting leadership development begins.
Next Article in this Learning Path: Focus On What Matters Most
From Theory to Action
Create your “current reality” map. Spend at least two hours this week walking your operation end-to-end. Document what you observe without judgment: How do things actually flow? Where do people congregate? What informal systems exist?
Schedule five-minute introductions. Block time to have brief conversations with each team member. Prepare three open-ended questions: “What’s the most challenging part of your role?” “What do you wish managers understood better?” “What’s working well that I should be careful not to change?”
Document the non-negotiables. Create a single page listing your operation’s critical safety requirements, quality standards, and priority metrics. Keep this visible as your decision-making guardrails.
Map the communication flow. Draw a simple diagram showing how information moves through your team: shift handovers, daily meetings, reporting chains, informal channels. Circle any gaps where information seems to get lost.
Have the expectations conversation. Ask your manager directly: “What does a successful first week look like for you?” Write down their answer and refer back to it when you feel pressure to do more.
Start a “noticed but not fixed” list. Keep a running document of issues you observe. For each one, note: what you saw, potential causes, and questions you still have. This becomes your improvement roadmap for later.
Schedule a week-one reflection. Block 15 minutes on Friday to review: What did I learn about my operation? What did I learn about my team? What assumptions did I have that proved wrong?
Your first week establishes patterns. Make them patterns of learning, listening, and building context. The action comes later—and it’ll be far more effective because you took this time first.
This is article 2 of 9 in the First 90 Days Learning Path.
Previous:
Next:
