You will be able to hold a first one-to-one with each team member that sets clear expectations both ways.
On your first Monday as manager, the team lunch feels different. Someone makes a joke about whether you will still come for kopi on Fridays. Someone else asks, half seriously, if the CRM updates are going to be enforced now. Nobody says it outright, but everyone is waiting to see what kind of manager you will be, and whether the rules will apply to the people you used to sit beside.
Wei Ming felt this the week he took over. Aisha had been his friendly rival on the leaderboard for two years. Daniel had covered his accounts when he was on leave. Raj and Mei Ling had joined after him and used to ask him for help on their proposals. Now he was responsible for all four of them, and each one had a different picture of what that meant.
It is normal for former peers to check where the lines are. One might submit a late forecast to see whether you notice. Another might expect the good leads to come their way because you are friends. A third might go quiet and wait.
The temptation is to be lenient with the friends and strict with the rest, or to swing the other way and come down hard on everyone to prove you have changed. Both fail for the same reason: the team is watching whether you are consistent. If Aisha's late CRM update gets a pass and Mei Ling's gets a comment, everyone will know by Wednesday, and you will have told them that rules depend on who you like.
So decide early which standards matter, and apply them the same way to everyone from the first week. You can be warm and still be consistent. What you cannot do is make exceptions you would not make for the newest person on the team.
The first one-to-one with each person sets the pattern for every one after it. Most new managers spend it explaining their plans. It works better the other way round.
Start by asking what they want. What do they want from this job over the next year? What do they enjoy, and what drains them? What did they find helpful from previous managers, and what did they hate? What do they want from you in particular?
Then listen properly. Use the skills from Sales foundations, lesson 3.1, The three levels of listening: the same attention you would give a buyer. People rarely get asked these questions, and the answers will tell you more about how to manage them than any performance report.
When Wei Ming asked Aisha, she said she wanted to stay a seller and earn more, and that she found team meetings a waste of time. Daniel said he was thinking about management himself one day. Raj admitted he felt behind and was not sure he would hit his number. Mei Ling wanted fewer interruptions while she was writing proposals. Four people, four different managers needed.
Only after you have listened do you set out what you expect. Keep it short and specific: the activities you will look at, how the pipeline will be reviewed, when forecasts are due and what counts as on time.
Expectations only stick if both of you know how they will be checked. Before the meeting ends, agree three things.
How often you will meet. A short weekly one-to-one is common in sales teams because deals move quickly, but some teams meet fortnightly. Pick a frequency you can keep. Cancelled one-to-ones tell people they are less important than whatever replaced them.
What you will look at. Usually that means the person's pipeline, their activity from the past week, one skill they are working on and anything they want to raise. Agree that the last item comes first, so their concerns are not squeezed into the final two minutes.
How progress will be measured. Use the numbers your team already tracks, and say which ones matter most for this person. For Raj, Wei Ming agreed they would watch the number of discovery meetings held each week rather than revenue, because revenue would take months to show any change. Module 8 covers how to choose these measures across the team.
Within a day, send a short note that sums up what you agreed. It should cover what they told you they want, what you expect from them, how often you will meet, what you will review and how progress will be judged. Keep it to a few lines that both of you could reread in three months.
This feels like admin, but it does two jobs. It gives you one shared version of the conversation, so there is no argument later about what was said. It also shows the person you were listening, because their goals appear in your writing.
Wei Ming's note to Raj was five sentences long. It named Raj's goal of hitting his number by the end of the year, the weekly 30-minute one-to-one on Tuesday mornings, the focus on discovery meetings, Wei Ming's promise to review one of Raj's calls each fortnight, and a date in three months to look back together.
For more on giving feedback, running team meetings and handling the wider move into management, the First-time manager course goes further. This lesson is about getting the sales-specific starting point right.
In the activity below you will draft the agenda for your own first one-to-one and the follow-up note you will send afterwards. Write the agenda so that the questions about what the other person wants come before anything about what you expect.
Draft a first one-to-one agenda and the follow-up note you will send after it.
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