The First-Time Manager's Playbook: Lead with Confidence from Your First Day

Phillip Orton has spent over fifteen years leading teams, building organizations, and studying what makes managers effective—and what makes them fail. He began his career as a software engineer, where his first management role came unexpectedly when his boss left the company and he was asked to take over the team with exactly zero training and no idea what he was doing. That experience, equal parts humbling and illuminating, sparked a lifelong fascination with the art and science of leadership.

Over the next decade, Orton managed engineering teams at two Fortune 500 companies and a high-growth startup that scaled from forty to four hundred employees. He has led teams through product launches, acquisitions, company restructurings, and the transition to remote work. He has hired and developed dozens of first-time managers and has seen firsthand which approaches produce confident, capable leaders and which produce burnout and turnover.

Orton's management philosophy is grounded in a simple principle: great management is not about having all the answers but about creating the conditions for your team to do the best work of their careers. He believes that management can be taught, that most management failures stem from a lack of intentionality rather than a lack of talent, and that the single most important investment any organization can make is in developing its frontline managers.

He has written extensively on leadership and management for publications including *Harvard Business Review*, *Forbes*, and *Inc.*, and he speaks regularly at conferences and corporate events on topics including the transition to management, building psychological safety, and leading distributed teams. He serves as an advisor to several early-stage startups and mentors new managers through the Management Center's leadership development program.

Orton holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children, where he can be found on weekends either hiking in the Cascades or reading leadership books by authors he hopes to learn something from.

He welcomes feedback and stories from readers at phillip@firsttimemanager.com and occasionally shares thoughts on leadership at philliporton.com.