Managing Your Career Without a Manager

When I unexpectedly found myself without a manager, I knew I needed to really take charge of my own career growth. Here’s what I learned along the way.

Saswati Saha Mitra

Published in

Meta Research

6 min readJul 5, 2022

By Saswati Saha Mitra

Change and ambiguity at work have become the norm in recent years, and my experience has been no exception. A few months after joining WhatsApp in February 2020, I learned that my manager would go on maternity leave. I didn’t think much about it at the time, not realizing that her departure would lead to my being without a direct manager for 18 months.

My “managerless” journey hasn’t been easy, but it’s taught me a lot about keeping my career growing, including some things I wouldn’t have discovered under more conventional circumstances. One underlying principle: without the structure a manager brings, you have to create your own. With that in mind, here’s the framework for self-growth I created, along with some ideas on how organizations can better support people in unmanaged roles.

A framework for self-growth

Early in my manager’s absence, I was concerned about how it might affect my ongoing professional growth, so I asked myself about the main ways I’d grown to that point. I came up with four areas of focus:

Craft: It was clearly vital to continue expanding my hands-on knowledge of how to do research and communicate its impact. With so many new tools and ideas emerging in our field all the time, I needed to dedicate some time to keeping up with them.
Connections: I also wanted to deepen the relationships I was making within WhatsApp and Meta, and to build a strong peer group that could help me learn how to do my job better.
Stretch opportunities: These are side projects that might fall outside of my daily remit, but would advance my growth by pushing me to explore new and interesting areas.
Organizational intelligence: I wanted to continue deepening my understanding of how Meta works and makes critical decisions.

While your personal focus areas might differ, I think these four are a good starting point for most individuals trying to manage themselves.

Using the self-growth framework

Craft

Developing my craft was the easiest of the four focus areas. I signed up for learning sessions focused on using Meta platforms for surveying and completed several diversity-related courses. The survey courses helped me understand the systems that quantitative researchers in our team worked with. It also taught me how Meta had built this infrastructure, and what might be needed if WhatsApp were to do the same. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion courses gave me the understanding and vocabulary I’d need to address complex DEI realities as a leader.

If your organization lacks similar training opportunities, seek them out elsewhere. For example, Coursera, Udacity, and edX offer courses similar to the survey courses I took. The essential requirement for growing your craft is that you make time for it, above and beyond everything else going on. When we think of developing our skills as secondary to our daily work, we risk being unprepared for the future.

Connections

Networking was a little more challenging. We were working remotely, and while I met new joinees in team meetings, the WhatsApp team in London was growing faster than the number of people I could meet. So I signed up for two Zoom-friendly events: weekly coffee chats with new joinees to learn more about them and a sitewide London meet and greet.

If you’re new to your job and work remotely, make remote networking a regular part of your week. Scheduling 15-minute conversations with people whose work you find interesting is a great way to introduce yourself. Sure, there were times when I felt like I had too many meetings or didn’t feel like chatting. But making this a planned and predictable part of my week helped me build meaningful connections during a time when doing so was difficult.

Stretch opportunities

Before my managerless period, stretch opportunities had helped me gain valuable skills. So I jumped at the chance to support WhatsApp’s Covid response from the research side. Doing so helped me learn how to influence cross-functional stakeholders without having any authority over them. It also improved my ability to quickly make decisions by focusing on moving a team toward key actions every day with the best information we had. The experience prepared me to later handle a large team reorganization that demanded fast but thoughtful decisions.

When you don’t have a manager, one great way to find stretch opportunities is to talk to teams launching new initiatives, discussing whether there’s a potential to partner. In many organizations, opportunities like these are formally announced. You can also find fresh challenges outside of your organization by volunteering in startups or by creating and helping to organize community projects.

Organizational intelligence

I knew that deepening my organizational intelligence would be the most challenging of the four focus areas. The hardest part of self-management, I’ve found, is unpacking an organization’s unwritten rules and priorities. I wanted to know, “What are examples of highly valued impact that may be unstated in the job ladder?” Check-in conversations with my skip-level manager, a WhatsApp executive, were critical here. The focus of his questions helped me to better understand the priorities of my org’s leadership, and to lead my team accordingly.

I also built a “manager proxy group” — a brain trust of people in different parts of the organization who’ve helped broaden my organizational understanding. I’ve learned, for example, how WhatsApp is perceived in other parts of Meta, how to navigate challenging interpersonal dynamics, how to position myself from Europe, and how to show up as a leader publicly while also leading via my team.

If you’re thinking “All this is possible only because she’s a manager,” I’d say don’t underestimate the value of reaching out to people. Most people, both within your company as well as in professional networks like LinkedIn, will give you time if you articulate what you’re seeking their advice around. Connection is the first step, but remember to also do the hard work of converting all the advice you may get into action.

How can organizations support self-growth?

During volatile, uncertain times, it’s especially important for organizations to help people grow even when they’re not being directly managed. Reflecting on the last 18 months, I believe there are three key ways for organizations to support self-growth for their employees.

First, explicitly encouraging a self-growth mindset should be part of the organization’s culture and messaging. (Note that this is different from a growth mindset, in which people respond to feedback they’ve received.) Individuals should not only be encouraged to invest in crafting their own career journeys, but also be provided the tools to achieve that goal, with or without a manager.

We also need to increase peer learning and experience sharing, both of which are invaluable resources for self-growth. In my manager proxy group, my peers’ experiences have given me not only new perspectives on my work but also many answers to questions I’d normally ask a manager.

Finally, the most valuable form of support for self-growth is to allow managerless people to get feedback on their performance from senior leaders across organizations. These can be some of the most eye-opening conversations we can have, helping us see our work through different lenses and giving us a more balanced understanding of how we’re doing. Without such opportunities, a managerless person runs the risk of being guided by false assumptions, potentially slowing their growth.

Patience, trust, and plenty of help

Managing your career without a manager isn’t easy. It may cost you time and take you down a few unproductive paths. Your growth will likely be incremental; you have to be patient and give yourself credit for inching forward every day. You have to trust yourself and spend time on yourself, while also seeking out new connections and asking for help. But ultimately, the process of figuring things out, complete with hits and misses along the way, will help you develop a self-awareness and resilience that’ll serve you well throughout your career, whatever the circumstances.