Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Set Team Norms Early
Transcript
- Lucas: You take over a new team. First week, everybody's on their best behaviour. By week three, someone's Slack-pinging you at 10 p.m. expecting a reply, another person never turns their camera on, and two team members are making decisions in a side channel that the rest of the team doesn't even know exists. Luna: That's painfully specific. Did that happen to you, or is that a composite? Lucas: Bit of both. I've seen it play out enough times that I think it's the single biggest unforced error new managers make — assuming the team already agrees on how to work together. Luna: Right, because the team might have had norms under the previous manager, but those were implicit. And implicit norms don't survive a transition. Lucas: Exactly. So today I want to talk about how you set team norms deliberately, early, without sounding like you're laying down the law. And I've got a concrete framework that I've seen work at a company called Tendril — mid-sized SaaS, about 120 people. Luna: Before we dive into that, I want to say something. If this show has helped you think through your own career moves or management challenges, and you've been meaning to support it, you can do that at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to help us stay ad-free and keep these conversations going. Lucas: Yeah, genuinely appreciate that. It makes a difference. So — the Tendril example. A product manager named Sarah got promoted to lead a team of four engineers and a designer. Her first week, she sent around a simple Google Doc titled 'How We Work Best.' She called it a working agreement. Luna: A working agreement. I've seen those before — sometimes they're just a list of 'be respectful' platitudes that nobody reads. Lucas: Right, exactly. The difference is, Sarah didn't write the document herself. She started the first team meeting by saying, 'I want us to be a team where everyone feels like they can do their best work. So let's talk about what that looks like in practice.' And she asked three questions. Luna: What were the three questions? Lucas: Number one: 'What frustrates you about how we communicate right now?' Number two: 'When do you feel most productive, and what conditions help that happen?' And number three: 'What's one thing you'd like to change about how we make decisions?' Luna: So she's surfacing pain points first, not prescribing solutions. Lucas: Exactly. The team came up with stuff like: 'Slack after 7 p.m. should not expect a reply until morning,' 'We should have a clear decision-maker for each project,' and 'Meetings should always have an agenda, even if it's one line.' Nothing mind-blowing individually, but collectively it created a shared contract. Luna: And because they generated it themselves, they were more likely to follow it. Lucas: That's the psychological principle at work — commitment and consistency. People live up to what they co-create. If Sarah had just sent an email saying 'Here are the new team rules,' it would have landed completely differently. Luna: Is there a risk that the norms become too rigid? Like, what if the team needs flexibility sometimes? Lucas: Great question. The key is to frame norms as experiments, not permanent laws. Sarah said, 'Let's try these for three weeks, then we'll check in and adjust.' That makes them feel provisional. And in practice, most teams end up keeping maybe 80 percent and tweaking the rest. Luna: So the three-week check-in is built in. That's a good forcing function. Lucas: Yeah. And I want to give you one more tactic that I think is especially useful for new managers. It's something I call the 'one-pager sprint.' Within the first two weeks, you write a single-page document that answers: 'What decisions can the team make independently? What decisions need to come to me? And what decisions require a broader stakeholder?' Luna: That's basically a RACI, but condensed. Lucas: Exactly. But what's powerful is that you share it as a draft and ask the team to push back. That one-pager often surfaces disagreements that nobody realised existed. At Tendril, Sarah discovered that the designer thought she had final say on UI changes, but the lead engineer thought they were supposed to sign off too. That's a conflict that would have festered for months if they hadn't addressed it head-on. Luna: And it's such a small thing to clarify upfront. So the one-pager sprint and the working agreement — those are two concrete tools. What about norms around meetings specifically? That's a big one for new managers. Lucas: Yeah, meetings are where norms get violated most visibly. I recommend new managers set three meeting norms explicitly: start and end on time, have a stated outcome for every meeting, and whoever calls the meeting is responsible for a brief summary within 24 hours. Those three alone reduce a huge amount of friction. Luna: And you model that yourself, right? You don't just tell the team — you do it. Lucas: Absolutely. The single biggest predictor of whether norms stick is whether the manager lives them visibly. If you say 'no Slack after 7' but you're emailing at 11 p.m., the norm is dead. Luna: So it's also about self-awareness as a new manager. You're setting the tone even when you don't realise it. Lucas: That's the part I think a lot of new managers miss. They focus on the big strategic stuff — rightfully — but they underestimate how much the team is watching their daily behaviour for cues. Setting norms early is actually a form of establishing trust, because it signals that you care about the team's experience, not just the output. Luna: I want to go back to the working agreement for a second. What if the team is resistant? Like, they think it's a waste of time or they've done it before? Lucas: That's a fair concern. The way around it is to anchor it to a real problem they already feel. If you start the conversation with 'I've noticed that sometimes decisions get stuck because we're not sure who's responsible' — that's a pain point they recognise. The working agreement is just a tool to solve it. Also, keep it short. If the document is more than one page, it's too long. Luna: One page, three questions, three-week check-in. That's a good formula. Lucas: And then revisit it regularly. I suggest every quarter, or whenever a new person joins the team. Norms aren't static — they should evolve. Luna: Alright, so if I'm a new manager listening, what's the one thing I should do tomorrow? Lucas: Block thirty minutes on your calendar. Write down the three biggest frustrations you've observed or heard about how the team works. Then schedule a thirty-minute meeting with the team — call it 'Team Operating Agreement' — and ask those three questions we talked about. That's it. By the end of the week, you'll have a working document that will save you months of headaches. Luna: Thirty minutes, one document, three questions. That's actionable. I'm going to try that myself, actually. Lucas: Let me know how it goes. I think you'll be surprised at what comes up.