First-Time Leader: The Practical Field Guide to Your First 90 Days

Sharon Lawrence is a leadership coach, facilitator, and former operations executive who has spent fifteen years helping first-time managers make the leap from doing great work to building great teams. She began her career as an individual contributor in supply chain at a national retail company, where she was promoted to her first management role at twenty-eight—and, by her own account, made every mistake this book warns against in her first year.

After more than a decade leading teams of up to forty people across operations and program management, she became a full-time executive coach. Her practice focuses on transitional moments: the new manager, the newly promoted leader, the newly inherited team. She works with clients across technology, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, and her coaching work led her to write the curriculum that became the basis for this field guide.

She is a frequent speaker at leadership conferences and a contributor on workplace topics in business publications. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family, and when she is not coaching she can be found hiking, cooking for friends, or reading biographies of unlikely leaders.