I will start reporting to a new manager soon. My team and role did not change, but management structure changes due to wider company reorg.
It’s been years since I changed managers and as I start thinking about topics I should cover early in this relationship, I am worried there might be something obvious that I would miss. I am counting on you to help me uncover these gaps .
When you start reporting to a new manager, what are the things that you ask about? What information you give and what do you want to know?
If you are a manager - what topics are important for you when you get a new person reporting to you? Are there any questions you ever got that made you think “man, I’m sure glad they asked that!”?
There no issues regarding that just be relax and do your job , the manager will bring his or her on topic to work with so do your job has duty assigned to you
One thing that matters is what’s the role of that ‘manager’.
Are they involved or passive, micro-managing or trusting, people managing or task managing, lead or demand, hands-on or hands-off, and maybe their relationship with their manager to understand why he needs or says the things they do?
I had sometimes been managed by a lead in that manager’s team(PM, Dev Lead, team manager). Other times I had more interactions with my manager’s manager. Sometimes I had 3 managers to report to, each with different functions.
I expect them to take the first step in a lot of things, as it’s not me the one that has to teach them how to be my manager.
Once I get to know who they are, what they want, and the direction they go into I have a choice on what will my new role in the team be and how to build a working relationship with them to support them to achieve their goals.
While supporting him, asking questions and getting to understand their actual needs are important. So try to find opportunities to confirm you’re on the right path on the tasks in progress.
Ask your new manager a couple of basic general questions such as:
(1) How do you prefer to communicate? In person, via email, via instant message or some other way?
(2) How often do you want/need updates?
Same as with all important changes in contacts - get to know the person. One manager might want detailed reports, the other one wants your gut feeling, its all about people.
Doing fun testing now but was a manager myself, I relied heavily on the team leader to give me f2f reports. Are you on time? How much is left? How are you doing? That sort of questions. 70% of the test cases run says nada.
Improvement work was run separately. At work meetings I avoided a 32 chapter “action point list”, just focused on the 3-4 most important.
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