This article has everything you need to know about best tips for new managers.
You got the promotion. Congratulations. Now comes the strange part.
Yesterday you were judged on your own work. Today you’re judged on everyone else’s, and nobody handed you a manual for that switch. You might still be doing half your old job, sitting in more meetings than you knew existed, and wondering whether your old teammates see you differently now. (They do. That’s fine.)
This is a hard moment for managers in general, not only for you. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, released in April 2026, found that manager engagement worldwide fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with the biggest one-year drop happening between 2024 and 2025. Managers used to be noticeably more engaged than the people they led. That gap has nearly closed.
The upside is that the habits separating good managers from struggling ones are learnable. Some come from big surveys, some from peer-reviewed studies, and a few from companies that have tested them at scale. Below are 16 of them, with the evidence behind each and something concrete you can do this week. If you want a broader picture of what people value in a boss, our guide on the best qualities of a great boss is a useful companion.
1. Stop measuring yourself by your own output
Your old scorecard was simple: how much good work did you personally ship? Hold onto that scorecard and it will quietly wreck your first year.
Most new managers don’t stop doing individual work, and they shouldn’t have to entirely. But the balance matters a lot. In Gallup’s January 2026 study of span of control, based on surveys of 16,442 U.S. managers and leaders, 97% said they still carry some individual contributor work, and the median manager spends about 40% of their time on it. Managers who stayed at or below that 40% line kept their engagement steady no matter how big their team was. Those above it were less engaged, and the drop got steeper as their teams grew. The data is correlational, so it doesn’t prove that doing too much hands-on work causes disengagement, but the pattern is hard to ignore.
The reason is fairly intuitive. Every hour you spend doing the work is an hour you aren’t spending on the things only you can do now: clearing blockers, coaching, deciding.
Start small: this Friday, look back at your calendar and mark each block as “doing” or “leading.” If doing is well past 40%, pick one recurring task to hand off next week.
2. Book one-on-ones and treat them as untouchable
If you only change one thing in your calendar, make it this.
Steven Rogelberg, Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte and author of Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings, has spent years studying these meetings. Speaking on the Federal Judicial Center’s In Session podcast in October 2025, he pointed to a stubborn gap: plenty of leaders rate themselves as very good at one-on-ones, while plenty of employees experience those same meetings as ineffective. Work from his research group backs up where the value sits. A 2022 doctoral study at UNC Charlotte by Jonathan Flinchum (chaired by Rogelberg, with 303 participants surveyed twice) found that the quality of one-on-ones, especially the manager’s relationship-focused behaviour, mattered more for engagement than raw frequency, as long as the meetings happened at least monthly. That one is a dissertation, not a peer-reviewed paper, so treat it as a strong hint rather than settled science.
So yes, schedule them. But also make them about the other person. Let them own most of the agenda, and save your status updates for a different meeting. Our article on how to have good conversation with anyone covers the listening side of this nicely.
Your move: set up a recurring 30-minute slot with each direct report, and open the first one by asking, “What would make these meetings worth your time?”
3. Give meaningful feedback every week, not every quarter
Feedback is the habit most new managers postpone. It feels awkward. It feels like it can wait.
Gallup’s numbers say otherwise. In the same January 2026 span-of-control analysis, which pooled seven studies covering 44,025 responses, about seven in 10 employees who strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback in the past week were engaged. Among those who didn’t strongly agree, the figure was roughly one in four. That held across small teams and large ones alike:
| Team size | Engaged, with meaningful feedback last week | Engaged, without it |
|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 5 | 67% | 22% |
| 5 to 9 | 69% | 25% |
| 10 to 24 | 70% | 26% |
| 25 or more | 68% | 22% |
Again, this is survey data and shows a strong link rather than proof of cause. Still, it’s one of the most consistent findings in Gallup’s management research. And “meaningful” doesn’t mean long. Gallup’s own guidance is that 15 to 30 minutes, done consistently, is enough, and that the best conversations touch on recent work, current priorities and what the person does well. So add a standing five-minute feedback slot to the end of each one-on-one from tip 2, and use it even in weeks when nothing seems worth mentioning.
4. Recognise good work out loud, and specifically
One finding surprises most new managers. Many employees say they don’t actually want weekly feedback. In joint research by Gallup and Workhuman, reported in October 2024 and based on a survey of 4,439 U.S. workers in April 2024, only 27% said they’d like feedback from their manager at least weekly.
Why? Usually because the feedback they get isn’t useful. The same research points to recognition as the fix. Among employees who received both feedback and recognition from their manager at least weekly, 61% were engaged, compared with 38% of those who got weekly feedback but less frequent recognition. Employees recognised weekly were also 2.9 times as likely to say the feedback they receive is valuable.
Recognition makes the harder conversations land better. People are more open to “here’s what to fix” from someone who also notices what’s going well. Skip it for long enough and you risk the slow withdrawal described in our piece on quiet cracking.
A quick experiment: for the next two weeks, keep a note on your phone and add one specific thing each person did well. Mention it to them within a day.
5. Make it safe to disagree with you
New managers often want to look like they have the answers. Teams, though, do better when people feel safe pointing out that the answer is wrong.
That idea has some of the strongest backing in organisational research. M. Lance Frazier and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology in 2017 pooling 136 independent samples, more than 22,000 people and nearly 5,000 groups. They found psychological safety, the shared sense that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks, was linked to task performance, learning and engagement, and that positive leader relationships were among its key antecedents. It’s older than I’d normally like, but it remains the reference point in the field. A newer bibliometric review by K. Božić, published in May 2026 in the Annals of the Faculty of Economics in Subotica, mapped 278 studies from 2018 to 2025 and found psychological safety still sits at the centre of the research on team performance.
Most of that safety is built in small moments. How you react the first time someone flags a problem tells the whole team what to expect next time. If you struggle with pushback, our guide on how to be tolerant of people’s opinions is worth a read.
Next time, do this: when someone challenges your idea in a meeting, thank them first and ask a follow-up question before you defend your position.
6. Coach more than you fix
When someone brings you a problem, the fastest response is to solve it. It’s also the response that keeps them coming back with the next one.
Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Solutions division, which has around 70,000 employees, offers a real example of what happens when coaching becomes part of the manager’s job. According to a 2025 case study published by the International Coaching Federation, the division first introduced coaching in 2019. After a 2022 review showed most coaching had gone to senior leaders and a small group of high-potential staff, it broadened the program into one-on-one coaching, group coaching and structured manager-as-coach training. Coaching became one of the top three behaviours expected of every leader there, and HR started tracking how employees rated their managers’ coaching. Participants showed a 34% average improvement in core career behaviours, already-strong engagement rose 4%, and coached employees were 17% more likely to seek internal opportunities. One caution: this is an award case study built on the company’s own metrics, not an independent evaluation.
You don’t need a corporate program to borrow the core move. It’s mostly asking better questions before offering answers. “What have you tried?” and “What would you do if I weren’t here?” do a surprising amount of the work. Ask one of them the next time someone brings you a problem, and wait through the silence before you offer your own answer.
7. Delegate the work you secretly want to keep
Delegation sounds simple until you have to hand over the task you’re best at.
You’re not alone in finding this hard. The Cegos Group’s 2025 International Barometer, a survey of 4,271 first-time managers across 10 countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia carried out in March 2025, found that 52% admitted being reluctant to delegate some tasks, and that this reluctance was adding to their workload. Two-thirds (67%) also said their working hours were steadily increasing. Those two numbers are connected.
Part of the problem is how delegation feels. A set of five studies by Modupe Akinola, Ashley Martin and Katherine Phillips, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2018, found that women in particular associated delegating with guilt and being bossy, and delegated less as a result. When delegation was reframed as something that develops the other person, those negative associations eased. That reframe works for anyone, regardless of gender. Hoarding work also tends to slide into hovering, which is exactly what people dislike most in a micromanager.
Test it this week: pick one task you enjoy and are good at, hand it to someone who’d grow from it, and explain why you chose them.
8. Rebuild the relationship with your former peers
This is the awkward one, and there’s no clean script.
Think of it like a teammate who suddenly becomes the referee halfway through the season. Same people, same pitch, but your calls now affect everyone’s game, and everyone watches you a little more closely. The comparison breaks down in one big way, though. A referee stays neutral and leaves at the end of the match. You still want the team to win, and you’ll be working alongside these people for years.
The awkwardness is real and measurable. In the Cegos 2025 barometer, 73% of first-time managers reported dealing with conflicts inside or between departments, and 38% described a sense of managerial isolation. Gallup’s 2026 report adds that leaders are 10 percentage points more likely than individual contributors to report feeling lonely a lot of the previous day. Some distance comes with the role. Cold distance doesn’t have to.
Say you’re now managing Sam, who used to be your lunch buddy and your best sounding board. Pretending nothing has changed will feel fake to both of you. Pulling away completely will feel like a punishment. The middle path is to name the shift and agree how you’ll handle it. Our guide on how to be an understanding person has more on reading these situations well.
Here’s a simple way in: in your first one-on-one with a former peer, say something like, “This is a bit weird for me too. What would help us keep working well together?”
9. Talk about careers, not just tasks
Ask your team what they’re working on and you’ll get a long answer. Ask where they want to be in two years and you might get silence, because nobody has asked before.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report, published in early 2025, found that only 15% of employees said their manager had helped them build a career plan in the past six months, five points lower than the year before. The report also found that a lack of proper support for managers was the top barrier to career development, cited by 50% of the learning and talent professionals surveyed. Managers aren’t uninterested. They’re stretched.
A career conversation doesn’t need a formal framework. It needs you to ask, listen, and then follow through on one thing, such as a stretch project, an introduction, or a course. For team members who don’t yet see their own potential, our piece on how to stop underestimating yourself might be worth passing along.
Give it a go: once a quarter, turn one of your regular one-on-ones into a career conversation, and end it by agreeing on one concrete next step.
10. Protect your team’s focus time
Your calendar is now other people’s interruption machine. That has a cost.
Microsoft’s June 2025 follow-up to its Work Trend Index, based on anonymised Microsoft 365 activity data, found that knowledge workers were interrupted by a meeting, email or message roughly every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times a day. It also found that 57% of meetings were ad hoc calls without a calendar invite, and that half of all meetings fell in the usual peak focus windows of 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m.
The chain of cause and effect runs like this. Each interruption pulls someone out of a task. Getting back into it takes time and mental effort. When interruptions come every couple of minutes, deep work never really starts, so effort shifts toward shallow tasks and late-evening catch-up. Microsoft’s figures describe the pattern, though they don’t measure lost output directly. As a manager, you set many of those interruptions in motion: the “quick call?”, the meeting at 10 a.m., the message that expects an instant reply.
Picture this: you agree with your team that mornings until 11 are meeting-free, and that non-urgent questions go in a shared thread rather than a direct ping. Nobody’s workload changes, but everyone gets two clear hours back. Our tips on how to be more organized at work can help you protect your own blocks, too.
11. Admit what you don’t know
You don’t have to pretend you know everything. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.
A 2025 meta-analysis by Anthony Silard, Chao Miao, Arménio Rego and colleagues, published in Personality and Individual Differences, pooled the research on leader-expressed humility: leaders who acknowledge their limits, spotlight others’ strengths and stay open to learning. The meta-analysis on leader humility found that humility explained follower outcomes beyond what transformational leadership already accounted for. It overlapped with authentic leadership but still added predictive value of its own, and its effects varied with cultural factors such as individualism versus collectivism. Put simply, humility carries its own weight, separate from charisma.
For a new manager this is good news. You’re going to hit plenty of things you haven’t seen before, and saying “I’m not sure, let me find out” builds more trust than bluffing. It also gives your team permission to admit their own gaps, which links straight back to tip 5. Building that kind of self-awareness is a big part of emotional intelligence.
One small step: in your next team meeting, name one thing you’re still learning about the role and ask who on the team knows it better than you do.
12. Back your team’s use of AI, visibly
This one is new, and it isn’t optional anymore.
Gallup’s 2026 report found that, in its Q1 2026 U.S. workforce survey, the two biggest drivers of frequent AI use at work were how well AI fits existing systems and whether managers actively led its adoption. Employees who strongly agreed their manager supported their team’s AI use were 8.7 times as likely to say AI had transformed how work gets done in their organisation. Yet fewer than a third of U.S. employees in organisations rolling out AI strongly agreed their manager offered that support. As Gallup CEO Jon Clifton put it in the report, “Even the most sophisticated neural network cannot overcome an indifferent team leader.”
Supporting AI doesn’t mean you need to be the expert. It means making room to experiment, sharing what works, and being honest about worries, including job worries. If some of your team feel uneasy, our guide on how to deal with AI anxiety is a gentle place to start.
Your move: put 15 minutes on your next team agenda for people to share one way they’ve used an AI tool that saved time, and one way it let them down.
13. Be predictable, even on bad days
Teams can adapt to a strict manager or a relaxed one. What wears them down is not knowing which one will turn up.
Research summarised in Harvard Business Review in November 2024 by Haoying Xu, Sean Hannah, John Sumanth and Sherry Moss looked at more than 650 employees in the U.S. and U.K. They found that leaders who swing between ethical and abusive behaviour created uncertainty and emotional exhaustion, and that this hurt employees’ job performance. Being nice later didn’t cancel out the bad moments. A separate 2025 study by Rui Ma and colleagues in Behavioral Sciences, surveying 511 employees in China in two waves, found that mixed, inconsistent relationships with leaders lowered people’s sense of control and raised emotional exhaustion.
The mechanism is fairly simple. When people can’t predict your reaction, they spend energy managing you instead of doing the work. They hold back bad news, over-prepare and second-guess. Consistency frees that energy up. It’s also about keeping small commitments, which our article on how to keep a promise explores.
Start small: write down three standards you’ll apply to everyone, such as how fast you’ll reply, how you’ll handle mistakes and how decisions get made, and share them with your team.
14. Keep learning on purpose
Nobody arrives fully formed. The managers who improve are the ones who treat the role as a skill.
DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, released in January 2025 and covering 10,796 leaders and 2,185 HR professionals across more than 50 countries, found that 71% of leaders reported a significant rise in stress since stepping into their current role, and 40% had considered leaving leadership to protect their wellbeing. Yet the same report found that most leaders saw self-reflection, open discussion and continuous learning as practices that helped turn that stress into growth. DDI’s Stephanie Neal, director of its Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research, framed those habits as the encouraging part of an otherwise sobering picture.
Formal support isn’t always there, either. In the Cegos 2025 barometer, nearly one in four first-time managers said they had received no specific support when they started, and the most common way they built skills was teaching themselves with online resources (51%). That’s fine, as long as it’s deliberate. A monthly hour with a mentor, a peer group of other new managers, or a short course on one specific skill like difficult conversations will compound faster than random reading. Block one recurring hour a month in your calendar now, label it “manager skills,” and decide in advance what you’ll work on in the first session.
15. Protect your own recovery
You can’t coach people well on an empty tank, and the data suggests many managers are running low.
Gallup’s 2026 report found that 45% of managers worldwide reported a lot of daily stress, compared with 39% of individual contributors. Among the most senior leaders, the gaps were wider still for stress, anger, sadness and loneliness. The stronger evidence on what to do about it comes from a 2023 study by Klodiana Lanaj, Allison Gabriel and Remy Jennings in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Tracking leaders day by day, they found that mentally switching off from work in the evening helped leaders feel recovered the next morning and identify more strongly with their leadership role. That, in turn, predicted more inspiring leadership behaviour that day, as rated by their own team members. Replaying work frustrations at night had the opposite effect. The study is three years old, but I found nothing newer that tests leader recovery this directly.
So rest isn’t a reward for finishing the job. It’s part of doing it well. If your evenings tend to fill with replayed meetings, our guide on how to calm your nervous system offers quick resets.
Tonight, do this: pick a clear end-of-work ritual, such as closing the laptop, writing tomorrow’s top three tasks on paper and leaving the notebook on your desk, and keep work notifications off until morning.
16. Ask your team how you’re really doing
You probably rate yourself higher than your team does. Most managers do.
Gallup’s 2024 study of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors in the U.S. found that about half of managers said they gave feedback weekly, while only 20% of employees said they received it that often. Nearly 60% of managers believed they recognised their team’s work well; only about 35% of employees agreed. And just 42% of employees had a formal chance to give their manager feedback at all.
The reason for the gap is structural rather than personal. Without a feedback loop, you judge yourself by your intentions, which you can see clearly. Your team judges you by your behaviour, which is all they can see. With no channel connecting the two, those views drift apart, and the drift tends to favour you. That’s why outside input matters so much. It’s the same skill we cover from the other direction in how to ask for feedback from your manager, just turned around.
A quick experiment: once a month, ask each person, “What’s one thing I could do more of, and one thing I could do less of?” Write their answers down, and tell them later what you changed.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll snap at someone on a stressful day, forget a promised follow-up, or cancel the one-on-one you swore was untouchable. Every manager does.
What matters is the repair. A 2024 study by Claudia Coustas and Gavin Price in the SA Journal of Industrial Psychology looked at how followers react when leaders apologise after getting something wrong. The quality of the apology’s content, how promptly it came, whether it felt fair and the channel used to deliver it were all linked to followers seeing the apology as authentic, and to a healthier working relationship afterwards. Those effects mattered most when followers saw the mistake as preventable. The authors also warned against assuming that a good relationship beforehand will carry you through on its own.
In practice, that means owning the mistake quickly, ideally in person, naming what you did without excuses, and saying what you’ll do differently. Then actually do it differently, because consistency (tip 13) is what makes an apology believable. And go easy on yourself, too. One bad week doesn’t undo months of good habits. If a day goes sideways, our guide on how to get over a bad day can help you reset before the next one.
Conclusion
Becoming a good manager isn’t about a personality transplant. It’s a handful of habits repeated until they stick: regular one-on-ones, weekly feedback with real recognition, honest delegation, steady behaviour, and enough rest to do it all again tomorrow.
You don’t need to start with all 16. Pick two that feel most urgent for your team, try them for a month, and ask your people whether they’ve noticed a difference. Their answer is the only scorecard that really counts now.
For more practical advice on leading, collaborating and growing in your career, browse our Work section.
