PHASE 5 - Tools and Self-Assessment
Self-assessment grids
The grids below are available in interactive form in the starter kit. Rather than reading them passively, download the file, check off the boxes as the weeks go by, and use it as a personal dashboard for your onboarding. It is structured phase by phase, exactly like this guide: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bpCG9LcS4Ijvz6OgKV1DegK0xJ-0Vk3w/.
30-day review: Have I laid the right foundations?
- I have met individually with every member of the team
- I know each person's deeper motivations
- I have mapped my key stakeholders
- I have identified the culture's unwritten rules
- I have spotted two to three high-impact quick wins
- I have built an initial relationship of trust with my N+1
- I have set up a regular anonymous feedback channel with the team
60-day review: Am I building in the right direction?
- I have acted on at least one visible quick win
- I have clarified objectives with the whole team
- I have established a regular individual feedback cadence
- I have identified difficult profiles and adapted my approach
- I have aligned my priorities with those of my N+1
- I have started delegating in a structured way
- I can show a trend in how my team's wellbeing has evolved
90-day review: Have I created a lasting dynamic?
- I have presented my 90-day review to my leadership with supporting data
- My management rituals are in place and consistently followed
- I have celebrated at least one collective win
- My team understands and shares the vision I am building
- I have a clear plan for the next 90 days
- I am recognised as a trusted manager
- I feel I belong in this role
Your self-assessment is valuable—but it is subjective. The real question is: does your perception as a manager match your team's experience? If you think everything is going well and your team's mood data is telling a different story, that is the most important signal you can receive. And conversely: watching morale rise week after week, in step with your efforts, is one of the most concrete satisfactions you can experience in this role.
The manager's toolkit
Good tools do not make a good manager, but they allow a good manager to be even better.
Notion: To centralise all your management context and lose nothing: one-on-one notes with reusable templates, meeting agendas and decisions taken, your living and evolving 90-day strategy, a quick win tracker, and a stakeholder map. If you do not want to start Notion from scratch, the downloadable starter kit: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bpCG9LcS4Ijvz6OgKV1DegK0xJ-0Vk3w/ covers all of this in a Google Sheets format that is ready to use immediately, with no setup required. One single place where all context is centralised, from day one.
TeamMood: The problem TeamMood solves is straightforward: as a manager, you do not really know how your team is feeling. You have impressions, intuitions, fragments of conversations. But you do not have data. And without data, you are managing blind.
TeamMood is a team wellbeing tracking tool built for managers. Every day, your team members share their mood with a single click and can leave an anonymous comment if they wish. The whole thing takes less than two minutes. Anonymity is total—which is the prerequisite for getting honest feedback. It is almost impossible to get sincere input when responses can be traced back.
On the manager side, you access a dashboard that displays mood trends day by day in a visual calendar format inspired by the niko-niko board from agile practices. You see the trends, the sudden dips, the rebounds. You receive an alert when morale drops, so you can step in before the situation deteriorates. You can segment data by sub-group if your team spans multiple profiles or locations. And at any point, you can produce a wellbeing evolution report to share with your leadership.
What managers who use it say: they discovered how their team members were truly feeling and what their real blockers were. When something is heading in the wrong direction, they know before the next retrospective, not after. And it helped them build a culture of transparent communication—not because they declared it, but because they created the conditions for it to exist.
TeamMood integrates with Slack and Teams, which means the check-in reaches your team directly where they already are. No new tool to adopt, no extra login to remember. The platform is used by teams ranging from ten-person startups to companies with several hundred employees, including Decathlon, TUI, and Ipsen. It is ISO 27001 certified and SSO compatible. For a new manager, it is a five-minute-per-week investment that fundamentally changes the quality of your people management.
Slack or Teams: To maintain fluid, transparent communication day to day: quick check-ins without a formal meeting, announcements and decisions shared openly, topic-specific channels for key projects, threaded discussions to avoid constant interruptions. Clear