New Manager Essentials, Part 2: Lead by Knowing What Your Team Needs Right Now
When I first became a manager, I was so enthusiastic. I wanted to do well, as I prepared to be in this role for a long while. More than anything I wanted to build the kind of team I always dreamed of being part of.
And I kept circling the same question:
What should I focus on first? My own skill gaps? The company’s goals? The team?
When you become a manager, your world expands. In my experience, there are three contexts that you continuously keep the taps open for:
Your own context: you’re in a new role, still figuring it out. You’re juggling the urge to do the work yourself with the need to step back and support others. You're learning as you go, trying to define what kind of manager you want to be.
Your team’s context: the people you manage, how you all work together, the rituals that make you productive and help you handle the pressure to hit goals. Your job is helping them work as a team, not just show up as individuals.
Your organization’s context: the bigger system you're in: changing priorities, different stakeholder expectations, and decisions that trickle down fast, sometimes without much warning.
In the first post New Manager Essentials: Your First Months in Leadership, I shared learnings mostly about the first context as the immediate support.
In this post, we’ll focus on the team’s context. I’ll share what helped me show up as the manager my team needed, and how that helped us grow into a team we were all proud to be part of.
Why the Team Comes First
A strong, self-driven team is the backbone of everything you’ll build together.
It will be the foundation of how you scale impact, drive high-performance, and witness how people go further than they thought they could.
It’s also what makes people proud of what they’re building. Not because of the results, but because being part of the team is what makes those results possible.
To build that kind of team, you need to understand what they really need support with. Like right now, in their current stage of development.
When I was just starting out, I was so fortunate to come across Tuckman’s group development model. That gave me the best mental model for seeing our own reality, and to adapt/perform based on that.
That’s what I want to introduce to you today.
How Groups Develop (Tuckman’s Model)
Tuckman’s development model says that any group of people that has a goal goes through several stages to reach a healthy place of performing. He described them as Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.
Your role as a manager is to notice which stage your team is in, and adapt how you show up.
Here is what those stages look like.
Forming & Storming
What it feels like:
A fresh wave of energy and excitement as change begins (forming)
But uncertainty brings anxiety and friction (storming)
Some isolation, as people navigate differences and get to know each other (storming)
What your team needs:
More hands-on support for clarity and predictability
A shared sense of direction and structure
Explicit conversations and introductions about how you’ll work together
At these stages, you may be anxious about over-doing it or micro-managing (especially if you’re a new manager) but you’re not. You’re building the scaffolding your team needs to feel safe and start trusting each other.
This is a great time, for example, to co-create a team mission statement and encourage pair work so people get to know each other better.
Be more hands-on with planning. Focus on creating psychological safety when disagreements arise. Basically, a lot more involvement than you may normally want because you are helping all of you create a foundation.
Norming
What it feels like:
A sense of purpose starts to emerge
The team starts to find its rhythm
People feel more engaged
What your team needs:
Recognition of team efforts
Processes that actually serve them, not just look good on paper
Continued feedback culture to keep building psychological safety
This is when you can start shaping what works. For example, adapting your rituals like standups, retros, or OKR planning so they fit your team’s reality. Please don’t copy other teams or agile methodologies that look good in theory. Help build what works for your team.
For example, in my team, we replaced stand-ups with async non-daily updates and created two check-in meetings a week to talk about specific problems or decision-making. Agenda for these meetings were also co-created on the week.
We held retros (with custom columns) that were everyone’s responsibility to host. We rotated among us, so the team owned the process and could assess or change it when needed.
Performing
What it feels like:
High motivation
The team runs smoothly when you’re not there
Ownership and accountability are shared
There’s a sense of trust and pride in how you all work
What your team needs from you:
Autonomy and space
Recognition and thoughtful support
Challenges that keep them grow
This is the time when you can step back to focus more on strategic work. Like creating quarterly goals that align business needs with people’s interests/growth areas.
This is also where you can introduce tools like a team skill matrix.
The team skill matrix exercise helps the team reflect together on their shared capabilities. And, spot gaps for learning, growth, or future hires.
It probably needs its own blogpost, but here is a quick summary so you can already start using it.
Imagine a two-hour workshop. Preferably in-person. This can be a great session to do in off-site gatherings. You start the meeting with this question as the first column:
“What capabilities, skills, and tools make this team successful at its mission?”
Then add three more columns:
I can learn it (1/0 — interested or not)
I can do it
I can teach it
Collect the skills together with your team. This creates enormous clarity as a group.
Then let everyone put their names into the columns. Some might be humble but don’t worry, others will help recognize their skills because you team feels quite connected by now.
At the end, you’ll see what kind of support team members can give each other to fill skill gaps, how much coverage you already have, and what kind of people you need to hire next.
I’d seen a version of similar things done in 1:1s. But, I reworked it based on what I felt was missing and started using it with the whole team.
This is especially useful if you a leader who wants to hire for the need, not the title. Which is always wiser.
A Note on Storming
Later research by Knight, Pamela J. shows that storming actually happens throughout a team’s development like when someone joins, someone leaves, or when pressure rises. That makes total sense.
A team isn’t a machine. It’s a living system made of humans and that includes you. Your job is to listen closely, bring safety and clarity when it is needed.
I’m deliberately not saying “protect your team from difficulties.” Instead, be the resource that helps them access what they need to move through it.
That’s what resilience is: adaptive capacity in action.
Closing Thoughts
Your role takes shape inside your team’s context, not outside of it. You’re part of the team, with a different set of responsibilities.
And through all the change, three things tend to hold:
Enabling > Managing. Don’t direct every move, be there to help the team go further than they could on their own.
Rituals are just like any other tools. Standups, retros, plannings only work if they fits your team’s context. Deliberately shape what works.
Autonomy = clarity + trust. Because when a team knows what they’re building and believes in how/why they’re doing it, they show up differently.
And so will you.
p.s. In the next post in this series, I’ll dive into organizational context: managing up, sideways, and everything in between. Subscribe here so you don’t miss it!
p.p.s. If you’ve been enjoying these posts, join us in the next discussion Lights On Humans: Becoming a Manager After the Technical Track, happening online (and free!) on November 4, 2025.
