First days as Line Manager

As a new leader, or a leader new to this health service, the most important things that you focus on in your first 90 days are:

  • Learn about the health service, its strategic direction and the community

  • Clarify others' expectations of you and your team, and be clear about what you expect from your direct reports

  • Align plans, decisions and actions to best serve patients, the community, stakeholders and your colleagues.

Select each drop down to discover more.

The key theme for your first 30 days is learning.

We sometimes come into a new role with the best intentions and can become tempted to start solving problems, but the focus needs to be on learning about your team, your role and the systems in which you’ll operate. This also means learning how you’ll connect with your team and your people leader, learning about your roles and responsibilities and starting to understand your work setting and environment.

Understand your role

  • Get clear on the job’s roles and responsibilities

  • Attend orientation and start completing your mandatory training

  • Start the process of getting access to systems (as this can take up to a few weeks)

  • Have your first CDG conversation with your people leader, and find time to ask them about your role, such as:

Note

This checklist can be printed for future reference.

The key theme for your next 30 days (first 60 days) is clarity.

This is where you’ll start to clarify, define and refine your learnings including your expectations, your approach, key priorities for your role and the team as well as your understanding of system/organisational procedures and processes.

Build relationships

  • Relationships – establish relevant relationships within the community (i.e. meet the community and advisory groups and networks)

  • Committee structure – identify the committees or statewide networks you need to be involved in

  • Professional practice support unit – identify the professional practice support unit for your role

  • Spend time meeting with key stakeholders and building relationships with other leaders and teams – explain what your team does and seek to understand what others do and explore how you can better work together. Some example questions for your stakeholder meetings:

Note

This checklist can be printed for future reference.

Deep dive into your responsibilities

  • HR Delegations

  • Financial delegations

  • Legislation and governance.

  • Procedures and processes (seek to understand processes of other departments – especially if they link with yours).

Deep dive into required systems

  • Understand the systems you'll need in your role:

    • myHR

    • S/4HANA

    • Office 365

    • DSS

    • RiskMan

    • Springboard

    • LMS

    • Clinical systems

    • Outlook

  • Organise a buddy or a 'go-to' person who you can ask questions about the systems and how to get support

  • Undertake required systems training.

The key theme for your next 30 days (first 90 days) is alignment.

After working through clarifying roles, expectations and approaches, you’ll now start to align these to plans and actions to increase momentum moving forward.

Strengthen relationships

Note

This checklist can be printed for future reference.

Identify your priorities

  • Identify the top five key issues to focus on in the next 6-12 months

  • Share these with the team and ask for feedback, thoughts or ideas

  • Work with your team to develop a plan to address the above five key.