Managing Up
A new manager resets almost everything you had built
When the person you report to changes, the informal credit you had accumulated does not transfer automatically, and the first weeks decide how much of it survives.
By Devika Menon4 min read
What actually disappears
A manager change looks administrative and isn’t. Most of what your previous manager knew about you was never written down: that you can be given something vague and will come back with something sensible, that you flag problems early, that a particular success was harder than it appeared. Written records capture ratings and objectives, which are the least informative parts. The judgement is in the head of a person who has now gone somewhere else.
So a new manager begins with a thin file and whatever they are told in a handover conversation that probably lasted twenty minutes and covered a whole team. If your previous relationship was good, the loss is real and worth taking seriously. If it was poor, this is a genuine opportunity, and one of the few clean restarts available without changing jobs.
They are under more pressure than they look
It is easy to experience a new manager as the source of disruption while missing that their position is precarious too. They have inherited people they did not select, commitments they did not make, and an expectation from above that they will demonstrate something within a few months. They also don’t know which of their new reports are reliable, which is an uncomfortable place to make decisions from.
That explains behaviour that is otherwise irritating. The requests for status updates in a format nobody used before. The apparent need to change something quickly. The unusually close attention to work that used to be left alone. Most of it is information-gathering and it subsides. A new manager who is still micromanaging at month six is a different matter, but reading month one as a permanent style is a mistake people make routinely.
Supply the context deliberately and early
The single most useful thing you can do is give them a clear, unemotional picture of what you own, what state it’s in, and what is likely to bite. Not a performance case. A briefing. What you are responsible for, what is going well, what is fragile, the two things you would fix given a free week, and who outside the team depends on you. It takes a page.
This is valuable to them out of proportion to its cost, because they are trying to build exactly that picture across the whole team and mostly through inference. It also has a side effect you should be honest with yourself about: whoever explains the landscape first has a strong influence on how it is understood. That is a reason to be scrupulously fair in what you write, particularly about colleagues, since a briefing that reads as positioning does lasting damage.
Ask about them too. How they prefer to receive information, how much detail they want, what they have been asked to deliver, what they are worried about. These questions are unremarkable at the start and awkward six months in, and the answers save a year of guessing.
Prior agreements are not automatically inherited
This is where people get hurt. Verbal arrangements with a previous manager — an understanding about flexible hours, a promise about the next promotion cycle, an agreement that a piece of work would be yours — frequently do not survive the transition, because they exist nowhere except in a departed person’s memory. The new manager is not being duplicitous. They simply do not know.
The practical response is to raise such things early, without an accusatory frame, and preferably in writing. Something like: my previous manager and I had agreed the following, I wanted to check that still holds. That is easy to say in week two and much harder in month four when you have been operating on an assumption. If the answer is no, it is far better to know then. This is also a decent argument for putting anything significant in an email at the time it is agreed, which sounds distrustful and is simply how organisations keep memory.
Give it a real chance, and watch for the specific failure
Most new managers settle. The reasonable posture is patience for a couple of months, active help in getting them oriented, and a suspended judgement about their style until they have stopped being new. Comparing them unfavourably to a predecessor, out loud, is both common and unwise, and it puts you in a category you do not want to be in.
The failure worth watching for is the arrival of a manager who brings their own people, sidelines the inherited team, and reallocates the interesting work. That pattern is recognisable within a few months: your scope narrows, you stop being in the conversations you used to be in, and the explanations are always about something temporary. If you see it, it rarely reverses, and it is a reasonable point to start thinking about a move rather than waiting to be told.
Common questions
Should I tell a new manager about problems with the old one?
Be careful. Factual, work-relevant history is fine — a project that was left half finished, a decision still pending. Grievances about the previous manager tend to be heard as a warning about you, however justified, and the new manager may well know them personally.
What if my promotion was about to happen?
Raise it in the first couple of weeks and ask specifically what evidence they will need, because they were not there for the work that built the case. Expect some delay: most managers are reluctant to promote someone they have not yet observed, and understanding that is not the same as accepting an indefinite postponement.
How long before I judge whether this is working?
Around three to six months, once the information-gathering phase is over and their real pattern is visible. Judging in week three is judging someone under maximum pressure and minimum knowledge, which is not a fair sample.
Staff writer, After the First Job
Devika writes the explanatory pieces on first months, managing up, money at work and reads the small print so you do not have to.
