Free guide · for new managers
Free First-Week Listening Questions for New Managers
You were promoted for being good at something. Almost certainly not for this — and week one is mostly about what you do not do. The highest-return thing available to you is also the cheapest: sit down with people, one at a time, and ask better questions than anyone expects. This is that list, already written, for the three conversations you cannot postpone.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Gives you 15 questions across the three week-one conversations — six for each person who reports to you, five for the manager you now report to, and four for your new peers.
- Carries, for every question, what it is really asking, what a useful answer sounds like, and the follow-up that gets past the first answer — plus, where a question can genuinely backfire, when not to ask it.
- Includes the two conversations almost every new manager skips: your own manager, who decides what your ninety days are measured against, and the adjacent leads you will need suddenly in month four.
- Gives you the five rules that decide whether a listening tour works at all, including the one people get wrong — write it up afterward, not during, because typing while somebody describes a problem changes what they are willing to describe.
- Closes with the fourteen-day report-back in five buckets, including the bucket people skip: not changing, and why. A listening tour with no visible consequence is worse than not having done one.
- Explains how to anonymize properly — in a team of seven, removing the name is not enough if only one person could have said it.
- Eight pages, US Letter, and it arrives already written. There is nothing to fill in and no blank template waiting for you.
Own it, don't rent it
Want the other twelve weeks?
This is week one of thirteen, and three conversations of six. The full playbook is 108 pages across four PDFs and adds the arithmetic the whole method rests on: every standing obligation of the job with a minute cost and a cadence, totaled against the week you are paid for and run across a span of control from three to twelve reports — for the worked example it leaves 3.2 hours of a 40-hour week for everything else. Then a 17-row delegation ledger ranked by how fast each hand-over repays its own cost, run through a transfer schedule under a realistic weekly budget. Plus the other 47 questions and the three remaining conversations, 30 first-90-days changes pre-sorted into week one, week six, day ninety and not yours, a thirteen-week plan with a “done when” for each week, and the chapters nobody prepares you for — managing the people who were your peers last month, inheriting a performance concern nobody wrote down, 1:1s that have gone quiet, your first piece of corrective feedback, auditing the meetings you inherited, and a day-ninety self-review.
A one-time purchase, four PDFs you keep. No login, no seat, no renewal — and it will still open the next time you are the one doing the promoting.
General management guidance, not legal, HR, or employment-law advice, and not a substitute for your own employer's policies, your HR team, or qualified counsel. Where a conversation touches conduct, a protected characteristic, an accommodation, or a grievance, that is an HR conversation before it is a management one. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.