Templates for First-Time Managers.

A curated set of 9 files for the first year — when you were promoted a few weeks ago, you are running one-on-ones for the first time with people who used to be your peers, and nobody handed you a system.

Four jobs arrive separately, and nothing joins them up

Becoming a manager comes with almost no instructions, and the work does not arrive all at once. First there is a first ninety days to plan — yours, before anyone else's. Then a weekly rhythm of one-on-ones to keep, each one supposed to remember what the last one agreed. Then a quarter starts and somebody wants goals, so you write objectives and key results and discover halfway through that nobody can tell whether they have been met. And then, months later, a review form lands with a blank box in it.

Each of those has a good template. What none of them has is the join. A printed 30-60-90 list cannot know when you started, so it reads the same on your second day as on your eightieth. A folder of separate files cannot tell you which of your six people you have not actually sat down with since last month, or whether you wrote anything down about any of them that would survive being read back. The New Manager's Starter Kit is those four templates plus a fifth file whose only job is that join: type the day you were promoted and thirty milestones date themselves across weeks one to thirteen, and a coverage grid reads your own one-on-one log back to name the single person who needs you this week.

You do not have to start there. Each of the four sells on its own, and two of them have free starters with no signup — a 1:1 Meeting Starter Log for one person's running record, and an OKR Starter for a first set of objectives. Start with whichever problem you have this week; the kit is there when you have all four.

The hardest of the four to fake is the last one. By the time the review form lands you already know the rating — what stops you is the blank box, and what fills it is the language everybody reaches for the night before the deadline: detail-oriented, great attitude, has real potential. The fix is behavior-based feedback — describe the work, not the person — and the reason it is hard in your first year is not vocabulary. It is that nobody kept a record. A phrasing bank that names the evidence each phrase requires is only useful if you have the evidence, which is why the thing to start in month one is a place to write one line after every conversation.

When your job grows past this shelf. Everything here is scoped to running a team you did not hire and do not yet budget for. Once you own headcount — what good looks like across a whole team, who can cover for whom, where the key-person risk sits, who is ready for more — that is a different set of problems, and the wider manager shelf is where those files live.

One caveat worth reading before you write anything down. These are templates and general management guidance — not legal advice, and not HR advice for your organization. A file that holds notes about named people also carries obligations: where it may live, who may see it, how long you may keep it, and in many places an employee's right to see what you wrote about them. Find out your own employer's rules before the file becomes a habit, and take proper advice before you write anything that will support a pay decision, a formal warning, a demotion or a dismissal, or that touches a protected characteristic, a disability or accommodation request, leave, or a complaint an employee has raised.