Growing as a Manager: What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Before I became a manager, I often heard that becoming a manager is not a promotion. It's actually a new job with new responsibilities. No amount of training will fully prepare you for this job. You first need to experience the challenges of the new job to truly understand the value of the advice given. That's why most companies send their managers to management training programs after they have gained at least one year of management experience.
As you grow as a manager—whether by expanding the number of people you manage or becoming a manager of managers—your work challenges also increase.
You would have less time.
The problems that get escalated to you become more complex.
You become responsible for bigger targets.
The people relationships you manage—up, down, and sideways—become more complex.
It becomes harder to see the devil in the details.
The tools that worked for you at one level usually fail at the next. The worst thing you can do is ignore that reality and keep using the same old hammer to fix new challenges that are nothing like nails.
I learn something new about management every day, so don't expect me to have all the answers you're looking for. What works at one organization might not work at another. Still, I’ll try to share some tools and tips over the next few weeks. Some of them might help you with your own challenges. Just follow me on Linkedin or subscribe to shreef.com to get notified about my new writings.
For now, let me add some color to the points I listed above. If you're already a manager, you will likely relate to some, if not all, of these points.
You Would Have Less Time
Many people believe that once you become a manager, you get to relax in a corner office while your team handles daily tasks. To be fair, many organizations, especially monopolies or those with a very stable market position, have managers like that. When you have tailwinds and a steady flow of huge profits, you don't need to paddle as hard. But the reality is, this luxury is the exception, not the rule.
In a free market and a changing world, most organizations are challenged by competitors, regulators, and evolving customer needs. Managers in such environments are constantly putting out fires, removing blockers, and finding new ways to help their teams succeed—all while operating under constraints.
A manager's first time-management lesson is learning how to delegate. Delegating requires having enough experienced people to delegate to. But this is real life. A good manager of managers ensures budget constraints for their team, so you will never have enough people to delegate everything to.
The second time-management lesson is learning to let some balls drop. All the problems on your desk might be important, but some are more important than others. You have to accept that something less important will not happen, and you will have to keep it aside for some time, even though someone somewhere is complaining about it. After all, you can't make everyone happy.
The Problems That Get Escalated to You Become More Complex
If you're like me, nothing gives you more energy than spending time figuring out a solution to a problem. This is what attracted me to software engineering, and later to product management.The moment you become a manager, you’ll notice that most of the fun problems you enjoyed solving are now being solved by your team. What's left for you are usually the dilemmas—problems that have no obvious solution. These are things that can't be solved by looking into data or conducting customer research because your team would have done that before escalating the problem to you.
So, you need to define frameworks that help you process all the available facts and opinions from your trusted team members and arrive at a decision. There is no guarantee that the decision will always be right, but at least this process helps your team learn about the variables you consider when making such decisions.
Some other times, getting input from your team might be a luxury you don't have. Decisions that impact people in your team are usually the trickiest. The consequences of these decisions can make or break your team, so you often have to handle these dilemmas on your own. This might lead to sleepless nights filled with overthinking.
You Become Responsible for Bigger Targets
With great power comes great responsibility. Early in your career, missing your target by 10% might have meant the company missed 0.01% of its target. But as a manager or a manager of managers, missing your target by 10% might mean the organization misses its target by 5-10%.
Being the manager that the CEO or VP holds accountable for such targets puts you at a higher risk of being fired and replaced with someone else. To be fair, VPs and CEOs usually get the same treatment from the management board, so they apply the same rules to you. Once you grasp this reality, you start to understand how a manager's success is defined. Your management style will begin to adapt to the expectations your senior managers have set for you.
At this point, many managers start questioning their desire to stay on the management path. I know many managers who have voluntarily decided to return to roles with less pressure and expectations. There's nothing wrong with that. It's wise to optimize your career for the life that works best for you. After all, we only live once.
The People Relationships You Manage Up, Down, and Sideways Become More Complex
One of the reasons I switched from software engineering to product management was people. I felt that the daily routine of a software engineer didn't give me enough opportunity to develop my people skills. Working with people is much more complex than working with machines. Everyone has different emotions, opinions, egos, goals, and priorities. Dealing with them as a non-manager was challanging enough. When I became a manager, I realized the complexity significantly increased.
Your manager, their manager, and the managers from other departments—all these people are important for your success. They are usually driven, ambitious, experienced, and very opinionated. Building alignment with them can take longer than expected and might require developing a new level of people skills. The same goes for your direct reports. Maybe they were once your peers, but now you're their manager. Some might challenge your authority, while others might try to present their work in a more favorable light to be seen as strong candidates for a raise or promotion.
The more senior you become, the more you encounter people interactions filled with details and nuances that you might never grasp on your own. The answer isn't in a book; you'll always need a coach or mentor to help you navigate these complex relationships. How you handle people challenges is likely to be the most important factor in your success or failure as a manager.
It Becomes Harder to See the Devil in the Details
As I mentioned earlier, once you become a manager, some of your direct reports (or those reporting to them) will naturally start trying to avoid bringing you bad news that might impact your perception of their performance. You can't blame them. Your organization's performance management processes usually make your perception of them and their work a strong factor in determining their pay and promotion opportunities.
The issue with this behavior is that the information and data they let you see is often a filtered version of reality. When you realize this, you might decide to micromanage some direct reports to bypass intermediaries or decide to set up a better checks-and-balances system for your team.
Micromanaging might work for a short period, but since you’re short on time (see point 1), you’re unlikely to get the desired results from micromanagement. Plus, you’d be neglecting part of your job: building an effective team.
A more scalable solution is to set up a checks-and-balances system to ensure that the reported information is as close to reality as possible, with minimal bias. This is why some companies invest in systems like A/B testing platforms and automated metric reporting to avoid misrepresenting reality.
Setting up such a system isn't something you complete in days or even weeks. You'll likely need to keep investing in evolving that system over many months and years. The question then becomes, do you even have the budget to invest in that system? The system will never be a finished piece of art; it will need to evolve with your business and be tweaked based on how your team reacts to it. (Check out Goodhart's Law: https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law)
A more realistic approach combines both potential solutions I mentioned earlier. You need to invest in building a system, but you still need to strategically zoom in on parts of your team's work to fully understand the details. Then use these insights to improve the checks-and-balances system. Then move on to another topic that deserves more of your attention. This process can't be done once; it must be repeated continuously because it will never be finished.
This is a big part of your job as a manager: iterating on the system that powers your team based on the information you gather daily. You’ll be surprised by the number of problems and inefficiencies you’ll discover that no one proactively told you about.
Management is a Fun Job
I don't know how to describe it, but all these challenges make me excited about the job. As a manager, every day is never boring. There is always a harder challenge to tackle and new skills to acquire. Most of these skills and experiences help me grow as a person. I'm accumulating so many stories that I will be happy to write about someday.
If you're looking for a coach to help you grow as a manager or navigate some your daily work challenges, Please check my coaching services page.