Note: these tips are for internal management transfers. If you’re onboarding someone new to the organization, you’ll probably need to do additional steps (including most of these steps, but a lot of additional ones).

Things to do

• Update your "About me" document, so that they can easily learn about your working styles/preferences, and refer to it when they are uncertain.
• Set up regular meetings
• Be aware of the curse of knowledge. There will be lots of context and links between things that the new employee doesn’t necessarily have. This could be as simple as clarifying who people are and how they are connected to us when you mention someone by their first name, but it can also involve explaining the basics of how some of our systems work, or why we chose to do things in a particular way.

Draft notes for one of the first 1:1s:

• Please read my "About Me" [link], and let me know if you have any questions, e.g. about:
• 1on1s
• Scheduling
• Templates/documents that you use, when they need to be filled in by.
• About me
• Other getting-to-know-you type things
• Special request: As you get acquainted with this new role, new colleagues, meetings etc, you’re likely to notice things that we could be doing better. This can be a real sweet-spot, where you get to see a lot of the details of how we work, but still have enough external perspective to notice mistakes we’re making. So I’d love it if you could keep track of things that we could do better, and share them with me. You could create a document, shared with me, to note things down.
• When working with someone new, I find it useful to check in early and often on projects, and proceed iteratively. Especially on open-ended work, I find that a new person going away for multiple weeks to work on their own without checking in purposes and intermediate products often results in wasted time and frustration. Much more frequent checking in about purposes and interim products tends to result in earlier course correction, and faster progress and iteration.
• I encourage you to Slack me liberally and request extra meetings if you think it would be helpful. When making such requests, I think it's best if you consider it my responsibility, rather than yours, to protect my time.
• I think it's important to make the most of the time we have together for this trial. I expect to become much less involved over time. I.e., I think this explicitly makes sense for early working relationships and that it makes sense for it to change over time.
• We should set or update your role description and goals
• Let's discuss your desires/needs from me as a manager. In particular, it would be great if you could respond to these prompts:
• What would you like to accomplish in the next year?
• What do you need from me to be successful?
• Any worries you have about this new job?
• If something went wrong here, what do you think that might be?
• What should I know about working with you?
• What are some things that previous managers did that you liked?
• What are some things that previous managers did that you didn’t like?