The First Monday
What the first days and weeks in a new management role actually look like — and how to navigate them without losing the team or your composure.
What nobody tells you about the first weeks
The promotion conversation is usually brief. Someone with authority tells you that starting Monday — or next month, or after the holidays — you'll be leading the team. There might be a handshake. There might be a brief explanation of what's expected. And then you're on your own.
The first weeks are a strange combination of excitement, uncertainty, and social awkwardness. You're still the same person. You sit in the same chair. But everything about your relationship with the people around you has changed — and most of them are watching to see how you handle it.
This page gathers the most important things to know and watch for in those first weeks — not as a formula, but as an orientation to help you navigate a genuinely unusual situation.
The first weeks: what to expect
Your team is observing everything you do in the first weeks — not to judge you, but to understand how things will work now. They're asking themselves: Will they be fair? Will they play favorites? Will they actually follow through? Your early actions set expectations that are hard to change later.
If you were friends with people on the team before the promotion, those relationships will need to evolve. This doesn't mean becoming cold or distant — it means being thoughtful about the difference between being friendly and being a friend, and what each looks like in a professional context.
The hardest habit to break in the first weeks is the impulse to step in and do the work yourself when you see it being done differently than you would do it. Resisting this impulse is one of the most important things you can practice — it's where the real work of leadership begins.
At some point in the first weeks, something will happen that requires you to address it directly. Someone will be late, or produce work below standard, or say something that undermines your authority. How you handle the first instance of each type of situation sets a pattern for everything that follows.
Your own manager now has different expectations of you than they did before. They expect you to solve problems, not just surface them. Understanding what they need from you — and communicating what you need from them — is a conversation worth having explicitly in the first weeks.
Managing people is emotionally demanding in ways that technical work usually isn't. The conversations, the decisions, the constant awareness of how people are doing — all of it takes energy. Learning to recognize and manage this is part of the work of becoming a leader.
Learning in context
The program creates space for new leaders to work through real situations with others who are navigating the same transition. The learning happens in the room — and in the week between sessions when participants apply what they've worked on.
The gallery below offers a visual sense of the kind of work that happens in the program: small groups, real conversations, practical exercises, and the gradual building of confidence and capability.
From orientation to structured preparation
The situations described on this page are exactly what the eight-week program is built to address. Each module gives you a practical framework for one of the recurring challenges of early leadership — so that when the situation arises, you have a way to handle it rather than improvising under pressure.
The program for your organization
The in-company format means the program is delivered inside your organization, with examples and exercises drawn from your specific context. Contact us to discuss how it might work for your team.