Your new boss does not know what you have already fixed

The announcement runs two paragraphs and is mostly about strategy. Your boss is moving to another role. Somebody you have met twice is taking the seat in three weeks.

You might be glad about it. You might not. Either way, something you spent years building just reset, and most of it only ever existed in one person's head.

The arrangements leave with the person

Think about what you actually had. A headcount agreed in a corridor. Permission to run one piece of work your own way, because your old boss had watched you do it before. A nod about the next promotion cycle. An understanding that nobody puts anything in your Thursday afternoons.

None of that transfers. It is not malice, and it is not politics. It simply is not written anywhere, so to the new person it does not exist. Which of those arrangements would you struggle to prove in January?

So write them down this week, while your old boss is still reachable and still feels warmly about you. For each one, note what was agreed, roughly when, and the reason behind it. Then ask them to confirm the two that matter most in a short message you can keep. Most people will do it happily on their way out of a job, and almost nobody thinks to ask.

Your record arrived without its context

The new person inherits your numbers and none of the history. The mess you spent last year pulling out of a hole now runs quietly, which makes it look like the easy part of your patch. Your best work has become invisible by succeeding.

You will be tempted to correct that early, with a full account of where things were when you took over. It lands as defensiveness even when every word of it is true.

Give them something that points forward instead. One page. What your team is for, the two risks you genuinely worry about, and the decision you need from them inside sixty days. Where a constraint exists because something went badly once, say so in a single sentence and move on. The version of your record that travels is the one attached to a decision they have to make soon.

Do not spend a month explaining your predecessor

You will be asked what was wrong before. Answer narrowly.

If you respected your old boss you will find yourself defending calls you never made. If you did not, you will offer a thorough account of everything that was mishandled. Both turn you into the keeper of the history, and both get quietly discounted, because a new manager assumes the person describing the old regime has a stake in how it gets described.

Talk about decisions and constraints, not characters. That project stopped in March because the funding moved. That process is slow because of a commitment made to another team two years ago. Facts of that kind are useful to them immediately. A view on who was difficult is only useful to them later, when they are deciding whether you are. How much of what you want to tell them is information, and how much is a case you want heard?

Agree how bad news travels

There is a short window where you can ask basic questions without looking slow. Use it. How much do they want in writing before a meeting, and how much do they want to hear in the room? At what point does a problem stop being yours to absorb and become something they want the same day? Do they want to sit in your team meetings or stay out of them? What counts as an escalation to them, as opposed to information?

The bad news question is the one to settle in the first fortnight. Most early damage between a leader and a new boss comes from a surprise that somebody had been sitting on for a week, out of a reasonable wish to solve it first.

Find out as well what they are being measured on this year. Whatever their own boss is pressing them about will reach your desk within a month, wearing different words.

Your team is reading your face

Your people are working out whether your standing survived the change. They are not going to ask. They will watch whether you still seem to know what is coming, and whether you can still get them an answer. When somebody asked you a straight question last week, what did they learn from the way you handled it?

During a handover you spend more time looking upward, and your team gets less of you in the exact weeks they want more. Do not promise them that nothing will change, because you do not know that. Tell them what you know, tell them when you expect to know more, and say plainly that you will pass things on as soon as you can.

Keep the one-to-ones in the diary even when you have nothing to report. Cancelling them is the thing that tells people something is wrong.

You have less time here than it feels like you do. Book an hour in the first fortnight, bring your list, and open with the item you would least like to have to argue about next year.