The First-Time Manager’s Operating System
A practical blueprint for cutting through noise and leading with focus, clarity, and confidence
As a manager, you probably worry unnecessarily about a thousand different things when you should instead be focusing on what matters most in your role. These worries form one of the most significant barriers to forming powerful habits, thereby confining most managers in the multifaceted trap of overthinking, reacting, and becoming unfocused, which happens everywhere there are teams. However, as a people manager, you have only three fundamental tasks:
Select, develop and engage staff.
Get them working effectively together.
Achieve superior results through others.
There are many different pathways to accomplishing these tasks, but each day, all you need to do is to do all the things that are necessary for you to succeed. It all circles back to a focus on the tasks, the team, the individuals and managing yourself. These core elements often get obscured by all the nonsense floating about concerning leadership and management.
Managers can get ahead by using a system that provides structure and guidance to help prevent them from continuously reacting to the many inevitable distractions that distract them from these fundamental tasks. John Adair's Action-Centred Leadership model, commonly called The Three-Circle framework (Task, Team, Individual), provides an excellent blueprint for managing any team.
In recent months, I have been mostly writing about managing people and how it differs from being an individual producer. In particular, the topic of Accidental Managers - those people who become managers without being adequately trained - who make up the vast majority of first-time managers. With this in mind, I have adapted the Three-Circle model to make it more relevant for first-time managers operating in financial and professional services environments. These work environments are typified by overload, dependencies, ambiguity, complexity, chronic pressure, fast-paced, and full of exceptionally capable people. An operating system for managers in these environments needs to operationalise and simplify the complex by providing pragmatic ways to speed up decision-making and help manage the cognitive load.
"It is only process that saves us from the poverty of our intentions."
Elizabeth King. American Sculptor.
Because of the focus on distilling the wisdom gained from working with seasoned and successful executives into my writing for Accidental Managers, I am toying around with the idea of calling it The First-Time Managers Operating System. Assuming the naming convention sticks, the FTM-OS focuses on the following:
Managing the tasks to achieve results
Managing the team
Managing the individuals in your team
Managing yourself and owning the new manager identity
My newsletter articles for the remainder of 2025 will focus on these elements, providing you with the process and guidance to create enduring management habits that lead to team and career success.
As the authors of The Lessons of Experience state,
"It's one thing to make a list of lessons, quite another to master them."
They go on to say,
"Especially for executives, learning is a murky business, occurring in fits and starts over time. Lessons accumulate, evolve, affect one another, gain potency in combination, don't take the first time, atrophy, and get forgotten. Some are much tougher to learn than others, and the toughest part of all may be using what one has learned to make a difference on the job."
The knowledge, lessons learned, and training experiences that make the most difference frequently hinge on timing. The statement, "Knowledge that cannot be applied will soon be forgotten," often attributed to Dr Wendy Shepherd, supports the idea that whatever is being learned should directly affect something you want to achieve.
Therefore, I hope my articles will help with your need to learn new skills and capabilities, because doing nothing new is undoubtedly unacceptable for the people working for you, with having to learn new skills to succeed and capture the incentives in front of you from doing a great job.
📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering
"All learning is error correction. By definition, if you are learning, you are going to be wrong a lot of the time. And will be updating your priors."
Naval Ravikant