How to be(come) a manager
It’s a difficult job and you need to invest to become good at it
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Public Service Announcement: As of last week, by popular demand, Wednesday Wisdom is now also a podcast! W00t! The production value is stunningly low but might improve as I learn the tools and maybe shell out some money for a Pro subscription of riverside.fm. The podcast can be found at Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Right now it consists of me reading each week’s article in a terrible Dutch accent, but who knows what the future might hold! Depending on the time, I might post the podcast on Wednesday or on Thursday. And remember, I am always open for feedback on either an article or the podcasts.
People regularly ask me for advice on the next step in their career, and not uncommonly, this next step is becoming a manager. I am not entirely sure though why they are asking me. I was only a manager for a short amount of time and, to be honest, the results were somewhat mixed. At first, I was doing a halfway decent job and then three things happened: The organization became more political, I started managing a more problematic team and I suffered from a health scare. This made me decide to step back and be an individual contributor again. I never regretted this decision but I always kept the option open that one day I would manage again if, all things considered, the team needed it and I was the best person for the job.
Anyway, I am honored by the trust people bestow on me when they ask for some guidance and as usual I am always happy to share what I know and what I have learnt. And, even though I have not been a manager for a long time, I have been managed a lot, both by good managers as well as bad ones and that taught me something too. I also feel free to share what I know because it is a well known fact that you don’t have to be a starfish to be a marine biologist…
The first thing to realize is that when you become a manager, you now have a completely different job. You are no longer an engineer, you now manage engineers. Technology knowledge is important, because how are you going to help your team move forward without in-depth knowledge about what the team’s work and mission entails, but your contribution to the team is no longer defined by how much technical work you do.
Most first-time technical managers are saddened by this and the number one complaint I hear from new managers is that they no longer have time for hands-on technical contributions. No shit, Sherlock! Of course you don’t! Let it go! If making technical contributions is your life’s joy, don’t become a manager! If you do want to keep doing technical stuff, you either need to do that in your spare time, or maybe, maybe, you can carve out a few hours each week to do a code review, write a shell script, or create a dashboard. If that is your plan, you’d better guard that time jealously. I would propose blocking your calendar on Friday mornings between 8 and 11 because if you don’t do that, all that time will be eaten up by meetings.
Anyway, you got an entirely new job now and your first point of business is to admit to yourself that you have no idea how to do this job. Thinking that you know how to manage because you have seen managers at work is about as dumb as assuming that you know how to code because you have seen coders at work. But, not all is lost! You figured out how to become a good engineer and you can use the same process to become a decent manager: Study! Practice! Ask for help! And most importantly: Make mistakes and learn from them!
My main gripe with companies when it comes to making people managers is that they typically offer only minimal support for this career change. Most companies send new managers to a course on how to manage within the law and that’s pretty much it. The job of figuring out how to become a decent manager falls almost completely onto you and I would suggest you take to this task swiftly and competently.
First and foremost: Find a mentor, preferably not your own manager because you want someone who does not have an immediate stake in particular outcomes of your team. Your company might have a system for finding mentors and that is a good place to start. Or you might know an experienced manager who you want to ask.
Power tip: When engaging in a mentoring relationship, either as a mentor or as a mentee, explicitly set a temporal boundary on it. I typically set a two meeting boundary in which we are going to figure out if this relationship is going to be useful. Then when it is, I often set a three month boundary to make sure that this is not becoming some endless series of meetings that is fun but stretches well into the area of diminishing returns with both parties feeling too awkward to bring up ending the whole affair. Setting a boundary right at the start makes sure that there is an exit and it puts some pressure on everyone involved to make sure you are working towards something. Obviously, at the end of the allotted time period, you can discuss extending the mentoring relationship, but I would suggest making that a finite extension too, perhaps one or two months. The whole purpose of this is that we/you are both in this effort with a program and one or more key results in mind.
Almost as important as a mentor is a peer group: Typically these are other newly minted managers that you can commiserate and exchange ideas, opinions, tips, and tricks with.
Here is another power tip: The best format I know for these peer groups is intervision. In intervision there’s not just a group of peers, but an explicit intervision coach who is tasked with making sure that the sessions are useful, that there is a structure with topics et cetera, and that everyone contributes. Without an intervision coach, the peer group meetings often turn into social coffee meetings which surely is nice, but not as productive. If your company does not offer coached peer group meetings, see if you can find someone to take this role. Be careful though that this person understands the role and does not see it as a mentoring opportunity!
The next thing to do is master your tools. As an engineer, I hope you managed to make the best possible use of all the tools that were available to you: Editors, scripting language, code review tools, test frameworks, and so forth. As a manager you need to do the same, but now your tools are things like Calendar, note keeping tools, spreadsheets, applicant tracking systems, HR systems like Workday (poor you), and the expense reporting system. To do your new job well you need to make sure that you can use these tools like a pro.
Next up: Define (or learn about) your team’s schedule. Every organization and team has a cadence to it and you want to be aware of that cadence so that you can do your job and prepare for things well ahead of time. Please note that I am not necessarily talking about things like your team’s release schedule. To be sure that is important too and you definitely want to know about it, but this is something that will be top of mind for lots of people already. What I am talking about are the things that are important but that maybe nobody wants to do or that are easily forgotten. I am talking about the performance review cycle, the OKR setting and scoring process, the promotion cycle, and the intern season. Each of these needs preparation and you want to make sure you start on time. So put them in your (team) calendar in order not to forget any of these important organizational recurring events.
You might feel like you are wasting your time figuring out all of this, learning Concur, editing calendars, reading up on the organization’s processes and so forth, but you are not. Stop thinking like an engineer where all of this is a distraction from banging out lines of C++! As an engineer it might feel that you could use your time better than to learn about the details of the expense report approval timelines and flow, but as a manager that is simply a part of your job. As an engineer you probably installed the GitHub app on your phone so that you got an alert whenever there was a code review assigned to you, so now as a manager you need to install the Navan app in your phone to alert you whenever there is a new travel request that requires attention.
Having taken care of this, you now need to start paying attention to your skill gaps and define plans to work on those. As a manager you need some skills that you probably don’t have yet, such as having uncomfortable conversations, giving feedback, managing projects, influencing without authority, and conflict resolution. None of these come naturally to anyone and so you need to figure out how to acquire them. Personally, I always start by reading books and there is fortunately a wealth of literature on these and other critical management skills. Be warned though that a lot of the books out there are terrible fluff, so I would suggest you ask around for recommendations.
Bonus content: I will include a list with some book recommendations at the end of this article.
Here is a fun management anecdote that goes to this learning process: A few years ago, my darling daughter became a team lead in the control room of a large supermarket distribution center. One fine day, she called me and said: “Hey dad, does it ever happen to you that you are in a meeting with your team where you agree on some action items and then by the next meeting, nothing was done?” “Of course”, I answered, “all the bloody time!” I continued to explain my project management methodology to her, including a shared meeting notes document, a followup email after the meeting with a summary of what we decided everyone would do, a mid-week check-in to see where everyone was, and a reminder the day before the next meeting. She took careful notes and proceeded to roll out this methodology in her own projects, much to the surprise of her team members 🙂.
Finally, to really get going you need a plan for each of your team members. As a manager your job is to help your team succeed and to help each of your team members perform well and grow in their career. That means that you need to figure out where each and everyone of these people is and what sort of support they need. Some people might need to improve along one or more dimensions, others need to get ready for a promotion, someone might sadly need to be managed out, and a few people might just be coasting and that is just fine. You need to work with each of the team members to define this plan and then create action items and OKRs for yourself and for them that makes sure this plan is set in motion. This part of the job is the meat of your work as a manager and I hope you like doing it because if not, you might have made an incorrect career move 🙂
Being a manager can be fun and rewarding, but only if you realize that you have a completely new job now and you apply yourself to it. Too many young engineers seem to let themselves be goaded into a management role without a good understanding of what the job actually entails and figuring out if this is something they would like to do. If none of the work I laid out in this week’s article appeals to you, for the love of all that is holy, please remain an individual contributor!
Bonus content: Book list.
Pfeffer, J. (2022). 7 Rules of Power: Surprising--but True--Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. Amazon
This book outlines how power works. Many people think that power is bad, but that is naive. You need power too if you want to achieve good things. After reading this book you will understand how power works, and then you can still decide not to do some of the things that the book says work. I for one understood very well after reading this why I am not a senior VP yet, because I don’t want to do most of the things that this book says work 🙂
Cohen, A. R., & Bradford, D. L. (2017). Influence Without Authority (3rd edition). Amazon
A classic title on how to influence people who don’t report to you. Key insight: Many people think that doing good work gives them influence, but the reality is that good work is “just” your entry ticket to the negotiation table.
Schwartz, T. et al. (2011). The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance. Amazon
Essential book on work/life balance. I used to teach a “Managing your energy” course at Google based on the material in this book.
Goleman, D. (2005). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Amazon
Classic text on emotional intelligence which will help you to fake empathy when needed 🙂
Austin, R. (1996). Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. Amazon
A breakthrough text that explains the limits of performance improvements through measurements. Key insight: You want to optimize some real world process and you get some imperfect metrics in place to measure parts of that process. Then people start chasing the metric, without looking at whether the underlying process is being helped.