How I Learned to Be a Manager of Managers

Key learnings from successfully transitioning from an individual contributor management role to a manager of managers.

When I first transitioned from an engineering management role to a manager of managers role, I felt complete emptiness the first couple of days. This new level of management meant I no longer had direct access to individual contributors but only to their managers, who were themselves often too busy. This was a fact I had not realised before I came into this new category of management. My initial thinking before taking over the role was: if I will be a director-level manager, I will have more control, therefore, I will have better results. In fact, that was not true.

Photo by Anastasia Petrova on Unsplash

Alright, even if I shared what I learned in the end, I was not there yet. I rolled up my sleeves and started coming up with a CI/CD strategy to enable the teams. I expected teams to execute on this strategy. I shared the plan and asked for a progress from the teams. However, the reaction was pushback. Neither individual contributors nor managers mostly started executing on this. I was not able to see the energy in people’s eyes that I used to see when I directly managed my team members. Plus, during the feedback round, I received a lot of constructive feedback about how I am supposed to distance myself from the teams instead. I was not expecting such feedback, this feedback shook my understanding and made me realize that I had to shift my paradigm about my new role. I came to understand that being a director is not about being again a manager with more power; it was about changing the leadership style to be more visionary and thought from a servant leadership style and try to get a buy-in rather than just creating tasks and expecting ICs to start working on them. This significant mindset shift allowed me to understand something I was never able to understand: Being in a higher position does not mean that you are in control. I understood that the primary team now is the collective leadership that I am part of. But it was not an immediate understanding; it took me a long time of reading, getting coached by my leadership coach, and receiving guidance from my CTO, and of course being open to feedback regardless of how difficult it was. While these changes seem rapid in writing, it was a painful, lengthy, and transformative process like any other paradigm shifts. Let me share the learnings with you:

1. Failure to Understand that Director is a New Job: This sounds simple, right? When you start doing a new job, you need to stop doing your old job and start doing your new job. As simple as that. Director position is a different job and you need to first understand that what defines your job best.
2. Managing My Own Time and Relationships: When you get to a higher position, you end up having many different stakeholders that you need to build relationships with. If you do not change your mind about managing your time, you can run yourself ragged so easily. I remember how much I stressed out due to the conflicting expectations and the number of people I had to talk to. Like we do trade-offs in software architecture, you need to understand how to make efficient trade-offs between the meetings and use the time efficiently. There is no way to deal with everything you encounter, and you need to understand the trade-offs and accept them. Also, relationships are not optional anymore, they are at the heart of your daily job and you need to invest in them.
3. Become a Mentor: As your role is not to get things done anymore, all you can do is to mentor managers on how they can lead their teams aligning with company values and objectives. As you have more context about the company’s direction and also management experience, it is time to teach managers how they can build their teams in that way.
4. Art of Communication: If you are a part of a small team, you have much more freedom about what you say and how you say it since the audience and the impact are relatively low. However, when you get to higher position, every word carries weight, therefore, the self-awareness that you need to develop is much deeper. Because the audience that you are talking to is listening to you on a different level and it is more diverse in their understanding. When you talk, it gives a stronger signal to the listeners, and you might potentially be destroying your own reputation and also team and even company culture if you do not know how your words affect your audience.
5. Giving Feedback: Feedback is essential to give in some situations. Although everyone knows the concept of radical candor these days, the implementation is a complete art. Especially in such a leadership role, you cannot wait until the next feedback round to give your feedback, but you should be agile in doing so and be careful about how you are doing it.
6. Recognize Your Power and Influence: Being in a director position gives you huge power in the eyes of individual contributors and managers. If you do not realize that and behave as freely as you were doing in previous roles, you might be destroying the psychological safety. Even making a small joke or expressing strong opinions on a subject can mute your team and make them feel unsafe, and they might start hiding themselves from you. On the other hand, overly empowering some team members and having great relationships with only some individuals in the organization might give a sense of personal favoritism, and worse, if you happen to promote those individuals, it can destroy the fairness.
7. Become What You Want to See: Now that you have no access to individual contributors directly, one of the best things to cultivate on your team is to showcase by being an example of it. Many directors fail to understand that it is not about talking about the values and mindsets, etc.; it is primarily about how integrated you are. When you talk about company values and your definition of excellence, your reports will not disagree with you, but they will not follow you too if you are not showcasing the same thing. So, it is easy to fall into the trap of “I will say, they will do” type of thinking which results in organizational hypocrisy.

Probably because of the pitfalls mentioned earlier, many individuals struggle to transition from manager to director level, even though they performed well in their previous roles. It’s natural to fail and learn, and in my opinion, this is the only way forward, given the challenges these roles present are often not apparent until one assumes them. Mastering this journey can be profoundly rewarding. Once you integrate learning into your life, you start using multiplicative power of the director position and you witness the growth and happiness of people within the organization you lead, which is an immeasurably rewarding experience.

These reflections come from my own path through leadership. I’m eager to hear about your experiences — how do these insights resonate with you?