Musings of a first time manager
Managing people can feel uncomfortable and is a messy job (reflected in the image of this post), but one that you can come to learn and love.
I was fresh out of engineering college at 24, and still remember the first time I had to manage people. It was a 10 member content team for my K12 education start up, and oh boy was I terrible at it! I didn’t know how to set goals or define processes or measure performance. Hell, I didn't even know that managing was a goddamn job! Every time there was a problem, I would run far away from the messy conversations that needed to be had, and instead jump in to fix things myself. I was massively insecure and this created major trust (I didn't even know how to make sense of this squishy word) issues leading to very high attrition.
After over a decade of work managing teams and continuous reading (from books like Tony Fadell’s Build), I am still learning the hard lessons of being a good manager, and I wonder if someone had just sat down and taught me this when I started working, how large a difference it could have made in my career.
Once you’re a manager, you’re no longer a designer or writer or engineer or whatever it is you really enjoyed doing. You will have to stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You now lead a team of people, and 70 to 80% of your time should be spent managing. Managing is the job!
When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings. And human beings are imperfect and complicated, which is the beauty of the job you’ve decided to take up.
One of the hardest parts of being a manager is letting go (that squishy word trust) and not doing the work yourself. You have to overcome the fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the project to fail.
Yet you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on and are surprised when the project comes crashing down! You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing.
As a manager, your focus is on ensuring the team is producing the best possible work. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. Being exacting and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step by step process by which they create the work.
Asking for help is a huge mindset shift. Don’t be scared of admitting that you don’t know all the answers. We get terrified when we realize that we don’t know what we’re doing. Of course we don’t know what we’re doing - no one has trained us for this job! But pretending you know everything will fool no one and you will only dig yourself in deeper.
Tear off the Band-Aid. Honesty is much more important than style. Don’t tiptoe around the elephant in the room. But know that you’re there to help and every word you say should come from a place of caring. Another big mindset shift.
Your team amplifies your mood. A great deal of being a good manager comes down to how you manage your own fears and anxieties. Before managing the team, you need to figure out how to manage yourself.
Your team is expected to outshine you. That’s your goal! It’s your responsibility to make sure they become the best versions of themselves. You need to create an environment where they can surprise you and surpass you. You have to learn to let go of taking pride in your individual daily accomplishments and start taking pride in the accrued wins of your team.
And finally, you don’t have to be a manager to be successful! Climbing the management ladder is NOT the only way to move up in your career. There are alternative individual contributor paths to make much more money and get stature. If you’re in a manager’s job and don’t like the messiness of managing, please switch to something else as you will hate it from inside, and your team will end up hating you for it.
The good news is that if you aspire to become a good manager, you very well can. It’s a discipline and a learned skill, not a talent. You can learn a whole bunch of #thriveskills (like fostering trust, emotional regulation and growing others) from places like #Harappa to make this shift a successful one. Something I wish I had known when I started my professional career 13 years ago. Learning to manage is an ongoing journey and it’s never too late to begin :)
