7 tips for new Managers
You can’t manage what you don’t understand. Technical skills are important and they get you promoted, but being an effective manager takes a completely new, unrelated skill set.
I wrote about advancing from individual contributor to Manager in a previous article, and today I’ll discuss what comes after:
1. Understand that your role has changed
2. Delegate
3. Know the business
4. Understand and support your reports
5. Understand and support your peers and superiors
6. Say yes
7. No excuses
These were hard lessons, learned from my time as head of engineering and later as a manager of solution architects. In hindsight, these lessons were present in a lot of the material I read in books and blogs, but they took a long time to sink in. I’m synthesizing them here in a cheat sheet I wish I’d had back then.
1. Understand that your role has changed
First-time managers must stop reacting to new goals with “I’ll do it”. They must break them down into tasks and assign them to team members instead. The temptation to take on the hardest tasks on their own is very strong, especially for those who advanced on the merits of their technical skills. It must be avoided.
You’re no longer supposed to be the best programmer, architect, designer, or whichever function you performed before. As a manager, your main assignment is getting the most out of your team.
2. Delegate
Managers who do all the hard work themselves might think they’re setting good examples, but in reality:
- They create bottlenecks — difficult tasks consume too much of their attention and other work piles up.
- They signal low confidence in their team
- They prevent their team members from growing
- They signal that they’d rather be individual contributors
In smaller teams, it’s appropriate for managers to assign tasks to themselves, but in ways that minimize the aforementioned risks. Pairing up is preferable to going solo, as it serves the dual purpose of speeding a task along while sharing knowledge at the same time. This is especially true for engineering managers. If pairing up is not possible, then the manager should take the least desirable tasks so their team can stay motivated and effective.
The overlap between manager and individual contributor duties brings a loss of focus which is detrimental to performance. It’s a trap many new managers find themselves in, especially in startups’ small teams. To avoid it, remember to delegate.
Managing larger groups of people isn’t easier, but it can be a lot clearer because there’s no overlap with IC duties. Technical managers whose direct reports are managers (or team leads) themselves shouldn’t be doing any technical work other than research, review, and pairing. Their attention needs to be on the bigger picture — roadmap, efficiency, process — and coaching. More on that later.
3. Know the business
I wrote an entire article about how beneficial it is for programmers to know the business of the companies they work for. It goes double for managers.
In traditional companies, with functional silos and strict hierarchy, managers are expected to make decisions that impact the product. “Senior Management” is often a synonym for “The Roadmap Committee”. Politics can play a role in those decisions, but generally speaking, it’s beneficial to understand the business to make good ones.
In digitally transformed companies, product teams are entrusted with autonomy over their work. Managers and executives used to traditional corporate dynamics can feel uneasy about the initiative shifting away from them. But those who understand the purpose of the business and can reason about their reports’ work in that framework can stay relevant and be valued assets.
4. Understand and support your reports
A very large part of a manager’s job is supporting the people who report to them.
- Know their skills and motivations
- Remove obstacles and distractions
- Assign them the work they’re most effective at
- Give them growth opportunities
- Let them go
Have regular 1 on 1 sessions to catch up, guide and counsel. Go for walks. Grab lunch together. Talk to them and hear them out. People won’t tell you everything you need to know. Problems can brew for a long time and catch you by surprise. More silence, more problems. So talk to your reports. Ask them how they’re doing. Everyone says they’re fine until they’re not. Be specific. Ask what’s easy, then ask what’s been difficult lately. Follow up. When someone tells you they have a problem, solve it with or for them. Show that you’re useful.
It’s bad to have barriers but it’s healthy to have boundaries. Everyone inside a company should feel free to talk to anyone else at any time, but if someone feels entitled to go shout at to your Operations staff when a database is slow, or to give assignments to your reports directly, your team has a you-shaped management problem. Startups can be intense environments with multiple priorities at once and there are strong incentives to push things through outside of process. But you were made manager because, presumably, you know how best to apply your team’s resources. If you’re allowing your team to get caught in some tug-of-war, you’re failing at your job.
Your team needs to have adequate resources to do their jobs. Guess who’s dealing with procurement for software licenses.
Each member of your team is on a journey. Give them work they do well, but also work that challenges them or allows them to grow in the direction they want to go. Do they want to become managers too? Great. Help them build the skills that’ll make them good managers. That’ll ease your burden while also keeping you honest. In tech careers, it’s more likely one of you will move on to another company than clash over who gets to be the boss. Make friends, not enemies.
Whether your reports outgrow their roles or fail to fulfill them, know when and how to let them go. You’ll know when it’s time. Listen to your gut, talk to your boss, and pull the trigger. Assuming the company is doing well, budget for a backfill should be a formality and you want to get Recruiting started as soon as possible. Always be gracious when writing those departure emails.
5. Understand and support your peers and superiors
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that tech is a people game. As a manager, you need to work well with other managers. Understand their missions and motivations and figure out how your team fits in the picture. Most of the time, goodwill fosters goodwill. The same is true of colleagues further up the hierarchy. Just don’t go brown-nosing.
Of course, It’s easy to get defensive when companies grow and politics start happening. There are people out there more interested in their own team’s KPIs than the company’s, or just in it to pad their CV, or just really out to take over your team or become your boss. From my experience, they’re not the majority, though dealing with them can feel overwhelming. Still, you need to help them be successful in their stated mission because the company depends on it.
6. Say yes
Note: Unfortunately it’s very possible to encounter peers and superiors who act in questionable, unethical or mysoginistic ways. If you find yourself in that situation, this section does not apply to you.
Otherwise, saying “no” to reasonable requests is career suicide.
Your reports, superiors, and peers are going to overwhelm you with requests for more than you can deliver, and often ask you for things you don’t agree with. How do you know what to refuse, and how?
Well, unless someone is asking for something truly obnoxious your default answer should be that yes, you’d love to help. And you should mean it. See the point above about supporting your peers.
God help you if you truly disagree with an ask from a peer. Whatever you do, don’t sabotage it. If you don’t want to be associated with the outcome, help but make sure the peer gets all the credit. If you truly can’t deliver, say you’ll help if they can give you what you need to deliver. If you can’t deliver now, say you’re happy to deliver later.
Do it responsibly and don’t be a chump, but do say yes.
7. No excuses
Being dependable is a top quality for managers.
The higher up the hierarchy you go, the fewer excuses are acceptable. An individual contributor can be forgiven for getting sick and failing to turn in a report. After all, they only have one body to work with. A CEO has no excuse for failing to meet quarterly goals because they have an entire company at their disposal.
You’d think that the degree to which excuses are acceptable would be a gradient, starting high and decreasing as you go up the ladder. In practice, it drops to zero at the first management layer and stays there. As a manager, if you fail to deliver, your boss fails to deliver. All the way up the chain.
Things do go wrong, but as soon as it looks like they might, raise your hand and speak up. Assuming there’s a valid reason, your boss will adjust their expectations and so will their boss and so on. That’s different from showing up at the end, empty-handed and full of excuses.
Management is very rewarding, but it’s full of challenges and can feel lonely. If you’re a first-time manager, I hope these tips help. Do feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
