August 1, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” ~ Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

For the past two months, my LinkedIn feed has been full of new beginnings. “Thrilled to announce I'm stepping into...” “Day one on a new campus.” “Honored to be joining...” It's a celebrated tradition of the summer routine, and it's the season of the new boss. Someone you've never met is about to shape your working life. Or you're the new arrival, and everyone's still sizing you up.

An important part of the first few weeks of any new role is meeting everyone around you, and your calendar will be (and should be) filled with appointments to begin building those relationships. But there's another pattern you can count on. People come to see you.

Every leadership role I've ever had began with an influx of meetings that were introductions doubling as requests, or requests in disguise:

“We need a new program.” “I have scheduled travel that needs additional funding.” “My program's budget needs to be increased.”

And someone always explains, kindly, what my predecessor should have fixed years ago.

I haven't found the restroom yet, but I'm already being handed an agenda.

I say this gently and sincerely. Don't be that person.

You may have been waiting months (or years) for someone new to come in, and you're ready for them to start solving problems. But unless there's a dire emergency, save it. For now.

Here's why.

Before you make your case

Most of us treat a new supervisor as a fresh audience. New ears, no history, a clean shot at making our case. So we move early. We get the ask in before everyone else does. It's a reasonable instinct, but it's backwards.

A new leader's first weeks are a flood. They're learning names, reading the politics, trying to figure out which fires are real and which ones have been smoldering harmlessly for a decade. Every person who walks in with a request is one more thing on a pile they can't see the bottom of yet. Even a well-prepared ask doesn't stand out in that flood. It just adds to it.

There's research behind the instinct to slow down. Decades of leader-member exchange work, going back to George Graen and Mary Uhl-Bien, found that the quality of a working relationship gets set early, in the first exchanges, and then it tends to lock in. High trust or low, the pattern forms fast and holds. The first weeks aren't just a warm-up. They're where terms can be set in stone.

So the question to sit with isn't “how do I get my priorities in front of the new boss.” It's “what do I want this person to associate with my name before I ever ask them for anything.” Michael Watkins built a career studying leadership transitions in The First 90 Days, and his finding is clear: a new leader's early job is to learn the landscape and get aligned on expectations, not to execute anyone's agenda. Which means the colleague who helps them do that is worth more than the one who shows up with a to-do list in hand.

This is a sequencing problem. You can't make a withdrawal from an account you haven't put anything into. The first weeks are for deposits.

What to do instead

Lead with their reality, not your list. Your first real conversation should be about them, and building a relationship. Do they need any help with anything? What has surprised them? What would a good first year look like from where they sit? Have they found the good lunch spots yet? These may seem obvious questions, but are rarer than you think. The ones who focus here become the person the boss actually wants to talk to. You learn what they're solving for, and you learn it before you need it.

Be a source of relief, not another item. The fastest rapport gets built by whoever makes the boss's job lighter in the first month, and there's evidence it sticks. Kammeyer-Mueller and colleagues followed new hires across their first 90 days and found the early support or undermining they got from the people around them shaped how well they adjusted, more than anything that came later. Undermining from the people they leaned on most even predicted who left sooner. You're one of the people shaping that stretch. Offer to take something off the plate. Brief them on what nobody's explaining. Subtracting from someone's load builds more trust than any update about your own good work.

Hold your asks on purpose. Your requests are probably legitimate. The program, the travel money, the budget conversation. Those matter. But a request that would stall in week one often sails through in week ten, because by then you're a known, trusted quantity instead of a voice in the flood. Picture the week your new boss is actually having. A dozen people, each certain their thing is the priority. Against that, your restraint is rare, and it reads as someone who gets it. Park the ask. Sequence it.

When you do bring something, bring it mostly solved. The day comes when you have to make the ask. Make it easy to say yes to. Bring the problem with a recommendation attached, not a raw mess to untangle. The colleague who hands their boss a decision is worth ten who hand over a to-do.

Bottom Line

The reality is a good relationship with your supervisor is the quiet thing that sets your ceiling. It buys you the cover to take smart risks, the benefit of the doubt when something goes sideways, and a real hearing when you finally do ask for what you might need.

The strange gift is that the best time to build that relationship is the season the boss is most underwater. Almost nobody uses that window well. They're too busy making their own case. Spend those first weeks making the job lighter instead of longer, and you become the person they trust when it counts. Not because you asked first, but because you didn't.

Try This Before Friday

Pick one new leader in your orbit. Your own new boss, or someone who just stepped into a role near you. Before your next conversation with them, drop your own agenda and go in with a single aim: get to know them. What are they walking into? What's weighing on them? What matters most to them right now, and is there anything you can take off their plate? You don't need to cover all of it. Just be the person who came to understand them instead of to be understood. They'll feel it, and so will you. Starting a relationship by giving instead of asking is its own quiet reward.

Who made your first weeks easier, and what did they actually do? Hit reply and tell me. The best answers I've heard are usually the small ones.

Thanks for reading today. See you next Saturday.

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