First-Time Manager: Leadership and People Management [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

You were promoted because you were the best at the work. The job you were promoted into does not involve doing that work.

Nobody says this out loud, so most new managers spend their first year trying to be an excellent individual contributor with extra meetings.

What the first year usually looks like

You keep the interesting tasks, because explaining them would take longer than doing them. Your one-to-ones become status updates, because nobody told you what else they were for. You avoid the conversation about someone's performance until it has become a conversation about their employment. You hire the candidate you liked talking to, and find out in month three what you failed to ask. And your own week disappears entirely, because you are still doing your old job plus a new one.

None of that is a character problem. It is a set of skills nobody teaches before handing over the team.

What the course covers

Thirty-eight lessons. Twelve of them are the core of the job: building a team, developing the people already on it, running one-to-ones, choosing a deputy, motivating someone who has stopped caring, deciding what to pay and when to raise it, bonuses, keeping your best person when a recruiter calls them, setting a direction, OKR, making a group into a team, and controlling work without standing over it.

Then six more on the one-to-one specifically, because it is the single ritual that decides whether you find out about problems early or late. The six formats, coaching with GROW, giving criticism that does not land as an attack, and how to make it standard across a team.

Delegation, your calendar and hiring

Then delegation, taught as the thing it actually is — a development tool, not a way of offloading work. SMART, the Eisenhower matrix, RACI, matching difficulty to skill, and how to stop taking the task back the moment it is done differently from how you would have done it.

Then your own time, which collapsed the day you got the team: the audit, prioritisation, GTD, time-blocking and the golden hour.

And ten lessons on hiring, because it is the one manager decision you cannot reverse. Job profiles, scorecards built from your own top performers, STAR and CARE, taking usable notes, telling a real achievement from a rehearsed story, assessing motivation, checking references, and giving a rejected candidate feedback they can act on.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have also promoted people into management badly, without preparation, and watched what that costs both of us.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

The first thing to do

Write down every task you are currently doing that a member of your team could do at 80% of your quality. That list is your delegation backlog, and it is usually longer and more embarrassing than people expect. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.