FIRST NINETY DAYS ON THE UNIT

You start on Monday. Nobody has told you what to do on Tuesday.

Being promoted into your first healthcare management post is not a bigger version of the job you were good at. It is a different job, and most people learn it by absorption, in public, while being watched.

This is not a book about the philosophy of leadership. It is a sequence with dates attached - a week-by-week field guide that starts before your first day and ends at day ninety, written for the ward manager, team leader, service lead, practice manager or supervisor who has just said yes and gone quiet on the drive home.

It tells you what to ask for before you start, why you should say almost nothing in week one, and how to meet every member of your team individually in the first three weeks - including the four questions that will teach you more than any report. It shows you how to choose the first thing you change, why it should be small, and why refusing to change something matters just as much.

Above all, it gives you words to use. Real sentences for the conversation with the person who applied for your job, the first difficult conversation about someone's work, the moment you are overruled, and the proposal you write in month three that has to survive a management meeting you are not in.

What's inside:

- What to ask for, what to read, and the four questions for your new manager, before day one

- Why week one is for names and visibility, not vision statements

- Learning how the work really moves, rather than what the org chart claims

- Meeting everyone individually - and the four questions to ask each person

- Running a handover, and the one rule about your predecessor

- Managing the colleague who wanted your job

- Choosing the first thing you change - and the first thing you refuse to change

- Getting the numbers when nobody will give them to you

- The first difficult conversation, the first incident, the first time you are overruled

- Writing a one-page proposal that survives the meeting

- An honest ninety-day review of yourself - and what to do if it is the wrong job

- A complete ninety-day checklist and a collection of sentences you can borrow