How to Find a Mentor + Why it’s Important, Part Two: Moving Beyond Individual Contributor

*This is part two in an ongoing series; read part one here.

To continue our series around sharing some of the actionable insights from our most recent handbook on transitioning successfully into a manager role, one of the most difficult challenges new managers face is coming to the realization that their success is now measured in terms of their team’s performance rather than their individual performance.

“One of the hardest things for new managers is the tendency to try and do everything on their own. They’re still approaching the role as an IC, trying to execute on all the deliverables.”

One of the hardest things for new managers is the tendency to try and do everything on their own. They’re still approaching the role as an IC, trying to execute on all the deliverables. If you’re trying to do the work of the entire team, you will be overwhelmed and experience burn out in no time. Take for example, Antoine Boulanger, a Plato mentor and an engineering manager at Google, who a few years ago, moved from the position of technical lead to that of a manager. He explains the transition from a tech lead to a manager at Box and his experience with this specific challenge in a story “where he started to slow down my team” and realized “In order to grow as a manager, you sometimes need to abandon one of your hats. As an Engineering Manager, you have to abandon your technical leadership as soon as you see that you have to make tradeoffs between your role as a manager and as a technical lead, or as soon as you see that you become a bottleneck for your engineers”.

Remember that each member of your team is most likely going to approach a task in a different way from you, and that’s okay. Therefore, the sooner you shift your thinking from “don’t worry about it, I’ll do it” to saying “you can do it this way — ask me if you need help” the more productive the team will be, and the more time you have to focus on other crucial tasks.

Still skeptical?

Let’s assume you keep meaningful IC responsibilities rather than delegating.

If you end up doing what should be delegated, who is going to coach Jen? Who will make sure Doug is focused on the right priorities for the day? Who is going to remove obstacles and blockers to ensure the team is successful? And perhaps most importantly, who will reach out to other teams to ensure the ship is aligned and moving in the right direction?

The point is if you continue executing on IC responsibilities instead of delegating, you will struggle to scale yourself and your team.

The biggest concern we hear is people are not “too busy” or “it’d be faster if I just do it than having to teach multiple people”. When we hear this, it becomes clear there is either a lack of prioritization, the leader is not delegating enough, or the team is not aligned.

One strategy Henry Hsu, Senior Engineering Manager at Zendesk follows is using the duck alignment that he outlines in this story.

To ensure delegating happens in a scalable manner, and to increase the likelihood of success, it’s important to set clear guidelines, over-communicate as much as you can, get alignment from the rest of the team on what they want to work on, and empower them to execute. If you set good expectations around projects and get them bought in, they will be much more likely to produce quality work.

To read the rest of the handbook and get other actionable insights, you can download our handbook here.

Plato is on a mission to help engineering + product leaders develop soft skills and build better teams. Plato does this through a powerful mentoring platform, where new leaders connect with seasoned professionals for 1–1 sessions, AMAs, and a comprehensive knowledge base.

Plato Mentors have extensive experience in management, and come from top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Netflix, and Spotify — among others.

Founded in 2017 by two French entrepreneurs, Quang Hoang, and Jean-Baptiste Coger who met while attending the prestigious ISAE-Supaero school of engineering, Plato is one of the fastest growing engineering + product mentoring platforms in the world.