Your New Lead — What This Book Is About

If someone asks what it's about. Somebody has just been put in charge of your team. They do not understand your work yet; they are already accountable for it, and in about 8 weeks they are going to start changing how you do it. The book is what is about to happen, in what order, and how to tell early whether it is being done well — because for the first month a careful new lead and a lost one look almost exactly the same from where you sit.

In one sentence. It is the first 90 days after your team gets a new lead, written for the people on the receiving end — the same 90 days as the book written for them, read from underneath.

Who it's for

Anyone whose team has just been handed a new manager, or is about to be. Not the manager. The people already there — including the one who applied for the job and did not get it, and the one who has been quietly holding the team together since the last lead left.

The problem it solves

Getting a new lead is a thing that happens to you, on somebody else's timetable, usually explained badly if it is explained at all.

They arrive with 3 things moving at completely different speeds: accountability transfers instantly, context takes months, and trust does not transfer at all. Inside about 3 weeks, they will have built a working model of your team — largely from the board, the channels, and the incident write-ups rather than from anybody's account of it — and that model will be roughly 2-thirds right. Everything they subsequently change runs off it.

The difficulty is that the good version and the bad version are nearly indistinguishable at first. A lead who is deliberately not changing anything in week 3 because they have been told their read is not yet good enough to act on looks identical to one who has no idea what to do. Both look like nothing is happening.

The book's claim is that the difference becomes visible on a specific date, that the date is the end of week 4, and that a surprising amount of what determines the outcome is genuinely yours — the things you say in a window that closes, the corrections you make while they are still cheap, and the promise nobody has written down that you are the only person who can raise.

What you'll learn

• That the window works in both directions. For about 6 weeks a new lead can ask anything without it costing them. The same 6 weeks are the only period in which you can say true things about how this team actually works and have them land as context rather than as a complaint about a decision they have already made.
• What you are owed at the end of week 4, in 4 named parts — and what to do when it does not arrive, which is the single most common failure of the whole 90 days.
• Why the order is what it is — why the retro is installed nearly last, why refinement has to come before planning, and why the thing you most want fixed is deliberately not in the first tranche.
• How to raise the promise you were made by the lead who left, in month 1, in a form that is checkable rather than merely certain.
• How to correct their diagnosis in the 10 minutes after they ask for it, which is worth more than any other 10 minutes in the quarter.
• What to do when the performance problem is a rota, and how to say so with arithmetic rather than a defence.
• The arrivals that are not clean — when one of you got the job, when the team was already in trouble, when you loved the last one, and when you are rarely in the same room.

The one idea to take away