Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / The Invisible Work Of New Managers
Transcript
- Lucas: There is a specific moment in every new manager’s first ninety days where the illusion of control shatters. You’ve been promoted because you were great at doing the work—coding, selling, designing—but now you’re spending four hours a day just figuring out who needs to know what, and none of it shows up on a performance dashboard. Luna: Right. It’s the gap between the job description and the actual daily reality. Most people think management is about direction, but it’s mostly translation. Lucas: Exactly. And I want to talk about a term that keeps coming up in recent organizational research: invisible work. It’s not just admin tasks like scheduling or expense reports. It’s the cognitive load of keeping the team aligned across departments, anticipating roadblocks, and buffering your direct reports from upstream chaos. Luna: So you’re saying the thing that makes them effective leaders is also the thing that makes them feel like they’re not accomplishing anything? Lucas: Precisely. A study from Harvard Business Review last year looked at mid-level managers and found that roughly sixty percent of their week was spent on coordination activities that had no visible output. No slide deck, no code commit, no closed deal. Just emails, Slack threads, and calendar invites. Luna: That feels familiar. I’ve seen former peers get promoted and then quit within six months because they couldn’t prove their value in the same way they used to. Lucas: That’s the trap. They’re measuring themselves against their old metrics. If they were a salesperson, success was revenue. Now they’re a sales manager, and success is... well, it’s messy. It’s whether three junior reps hit their targets next quarter without burning out. That doesn’t show up in real-time. Luna: It’s lagging indicator management. Which is terrifying if you’re used to instant feedback. Lucas: Let’s get concrete. Imagine a software engineering team lead. Her job isn’t to write the API anymore. Her job is to ensure the product team doesn’t change the requirements on Tuesday while the backend team is already coding on Wednesday. That’s invisible work. It’s friction removal. Luna: But how does she prove she did that? If the project succeeds, it looks like the team did it. If it fails, she gets blamed. Lucas: That’s the asymmetry. The credit is diffuse, but the liability is concentrated. This is why so many new managers default to micromanaging. Because writing code or closing a deal gives you immediate dopamine. Managing invisible work gives you anxiety. Luna: So the solution isn’t just mindset. It’s structural. They need to make the invisible visible. Lucas: Yes. And that’s where most training programs fail. They teach you how to give feedback or run retrospectives. They don’t teach you how to track your own time to see where the leaks are. I want to introduce a simple audit tool that takes five minutes. Luna: Okay, lay it out. What’s the audit? Lucas: The Sixty-Percent Rule. For one week, log every task in thirty-minute blocks. Categorize them into three buckets: Deep Work, Coordination, and Noise. Deep Work is creating something new. Coordination is aligning people. Noise is reacting to emergencies or answering basic questions that should have documentation. Luna: And if Coordination and Noise eat more than forty percent, what happens? Lucas: You’re drowning. Not because you’re inefficient, but because the system is broken. Your job as a new manager is to absorb that noise so your team doesn’t have to. But you can’t absorb it if you don’t see it. Luna: So the manager becomes the shock absorber. That’s a heavy load. Lucas: It is. Which is why you have to be ruthless about filtering. If your team is answering the same email twice a week, that’s a process failure, not a people failure. You fix the process. Luna: I like that distinction. Fixing the process instead of blaming the person. Lucas: Before we go deeper into the mechanics of how to build those filters, I want to pause for a quick note on support. If these conversations have helped you navigate a career move or a management challenge this week, and you’d like to keep the show ad-free and independent, you can buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It really helps keep the research sharp and the episodes consistent. Luna: Thanks for the support, everyone. It means a lot to keep this going. Lucas: Back to the audit. Once you’ve identified your Noise bucket, the next step is delegation. But not delegation of tasks. Delegation of authority. Luna: What’s the difference? Lucas: If you delegate the task, they do it your way. If you delegate the authority, they decide how to solve it. For example, instead of telling your rep how to handle a client complaint, give them a budget and let them craft the apology. You’re offloading the decision, not just the action. Luna: That reduces the back and forth. Fewer emails. Less noise. Lucas: Exactly. But here’s the catch. You have to let them make mistakes. Small ones. If you correct every minor deviation, you haven’t delegated authority. You’ve just created a middleman. Luna: Which brings us back to trust. Or the lack thereof. Lucas: Trust is built on predictable outcomes. If your team consistently delivers good results even when you aren’t hovering, your trust grows. If they miss deadlines because you didn’t provide clear boundaries, you tighten up. It’s a cycle. Luna: So the manager’s job is to create the conditions for predictable outcomes. Lucas: Yes. Clear goals, clear resources, clear consequences. Everything else is noise. And you filter the noise. Luna: This feels less like leadership and more like gardening. Pruning the distractions so the plants can grow. Lucas: I love that analogy. Because gardens don’t manage themselves. You have to water them, weed them, and sometimes cut things back hard. But you can’t force a tomato to ripen faster by yelling at it. Luna: Or pulling on the stem. Lucas: Right. So for your first ninety days, stop trying to grow the tomatoes. Focus on the soil. Check the pH levels. Remove the weeds. See if that shifts your balance from Noise to Coordination. Luna: And if the soil is toxic? If the culture itself is the problem? Lucas: Then you escalate. But you document everything. You show your boss that the noise is systemic, not personal. That protects you and gives you leverage to ask for resources or structural changes. Luna: Documentation as armor. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Lucas: It’s not just armor. It’s data. Data wins arguments. If you can show that forty percent of your team’s time is lost to redundant meetings, leadership has to act. Otherwise, they’re asking for miracles without providing tools. Luna: Miracles don’t scale. Processes do. Lucas: Exactly. So my challenge to you this week is to run the audit. Just five days. Track the blocks. Identify the top three sources of Noise. Then ask yourself: can I eliminate one? Delegate another? Or automate the third? Luna: Eliminate, delegate, automate. Simple triage. Lucas: Simple, but hard. Because it requires admitting that your old skills aren’t enough anymore. You have to learn a new language. The language of systems. Luna: It’s a different muscle. One we don’t usually exercise until we’re thrown into the deep end. Lucas: Which is why we talk about it. Because the secret is out. Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about making the room smarter by removing the obstacles. Luna: Removing the obstacles, not carrying the weight. Lucas: Precisely. And if you find that the obstacles are too numerous, maybe the role isn’t the right fit. Or maybe the company isn’t ready for that level of maturity. Either way, you’ll know because you’ll have the data. Luna: Data over gut feeling. Always. Lucas: Always. So take the audit. Share the results with your mentor or peer. See what patterns emerge. And remember, the goal isn’t to be busy. The goal is to be effective. Luna: Effectiveness over activity. That’s the mantra. Lucas: Let’s see if you can quiet the noise next week. I’m curious what your audit reveals.