Managers · Primly Community

first time manager advice: what I got wrong in my first year

firsttime_mgr · 5 replies

I've been a manager for 14 months. I got promoted out of a senior IC role at a 300-person startup. Nobody told me anything useful beforehand. This is the list I wish existed.

I over-managed the work and under-managed the people. I knew how to review code, write good tickets, prioritize. I had no idea how to have a hard conversation with someone who was underperforming. The technical stuff was fine on day one. The people stuff took about 8 months to not feel terrible.

I thought my job was still to be the best engineer. It's not. It's to make my team effective. Those are very different things. When I jumped in to 'help' on technical problems I was usually just slowing things down and signaling that I didn't trust people.

I avoided the performance conversation too long. I had someone on my team who was struggling. I kept thinking they'd figure it out. Then I kept thinking I'd say something 'when the time was right.' By the time I said something, three months had passed and they were even more embedded in bad habits and I had less credibility because I'd been silent so long. Say the thing early. Kindly and directly, but early.

I didn't understand that 1:1s are for them, not me. I used to run mine like a status meeting. My IC peers told me this was a mistake. Now the agenda is mostly theirs. I ask about what's stuck, what they're worried about, what I can remove. It changed the dynamic.

I underestimated how much my mood affects the room. If I came into a team meeting visibly stressed or distracted, people noticed and calibrated. You don't get to be 'just having a bad day' the same way anymore.

Still figuring out: how to give really specific critical feedback without it feeling like a personal attack. If any experienced managers have frameworks for that, I'm all ears.

5 replies

director_dee

On the feedback question: I use the 'situation, behavior, impact' frame. Not 'you were defensive in that meeting' but 'in the planning review on Tuesday, when Priya raised the timeline concern, you cut her off and moved on, and I could see she checked out for the rest of the meeting.' Behavior you observed, impact you noticed, tied to a specific moment. Much harder to dispute and easier to act on.

careerveteran

The mood thing is real and underrated. I was 18 months in before I realized I set the emotional weather in the room. Now I have a pre-meeting ritual: three deep breaths and a genuine question about how someone else is doing. Gets me out of my own head.

frontend_fran

As someone currently being managed by a first-time manager: please give us feedback earlier. Seriously. The long silence followed by a stressful review is so much worse than uncomfortable feedback at the time.

firsttime_mgr

This is genuinely useful to hear from the other side. Thank you.

analyst_ana

The part about 1:1s being for the direct report is something my current manager clearly knows. It's the difference between feeling like a check-in item and feeling like someone actually wants to help you.