> and therefore aggressively sought to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks

I feel this is as close to “Management 101” as it gets, or even “employee-ing 101”, as it applies to technical roles too.

Don’t do it!

Just write down your list of gripes for the first month; use them as your list of things to ramp up on.

If something seems odd or wrong, it may be actually broken, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent that you have to go out on a limb like this.

It’s more likely that there is some context you are missing. By Chesterton’s Fence you need to spend some energy to understand why the thing was put there, before you tear it down.

Even if you are right - you will face an uphill battle because you haven’t built trust yet. So pick your battles carefully!

The "WTF" list technique is great for this.

Every time you see, or encounter, something that makes you go "WTF?!??" you write it down.

Chances are you don't have NEARLY enough context yet to figure out why it's like that, and so barelling in to "fix" it is just going to lead to frustration and bruised ego's all around.

After a few months you'll either have crossed off things "Oh, THAT's WTF" or you have a list of things to start chipping away at, now that you have the FULL context.

From the author of the post: 100% I knew this advice but didn't follow it. Being patient early on is SO important!

I think the hard thing is as on engineer you're paid to have the "right" answer, but as a manager you're paid not to be right but to bring all the "right answers" together. That's a subtle but important shift.