Are you ready to switch from technical to managerial role?
Few years ago I had the opportunity to switch my career path and become a manager. I am sure for many people having “Manager” in their title sounds appealing, but this was not my main motivator. For a person with more than 15 years of experience in software development, I really wanted to try something new, even though I didn’t know what to expect. In the job description it was specified that it will be 50% hand-on work and 50% people management tasks. For me this was safe enough to dive in.
Almost 4 years later, I have tried to summarize what it looks like through my eyes.
Less to no coding
During the first year I was able to maintain a good ratio between being an individual contributor (take a backlog task, code it, commit it) and people manager. But then we started shaping a new product and slowly things changed. I had to focus on
- understanding the business requirements,
- get familiar with the new domain (it was huge and completely unknown to all of us),
- define priorities for the team,
- communicate with internal and external stakeholders, etc.
And all of these were bonus duties on top of any people management responsibilities within the team.
For me is important to maintain good level of technical knowledge. I want to be part and understand the technical discussions, challenge people’s opinions and suggest ideas. A big note — I don’t expect to be the most technically competent person in the team. But I don’t want to be completely detached either. Now, I am trying to look more from business and conceptual level, understand the broad picture and the architecture of our solution, without going deep into technical details. I regularly read technical articles and books, attend trainings and I think I have found a good balance.
Feel less personal satisfaction
Every person needs to feel satisfied of his work. Being an immediate contributor this can be fairly easy. You can
- write a piece of code,
- implement an interesting algorithm,
- close a pull request, etc.
This will give you immediately sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. However, for a manager, things are a bit different. Even though you complete many daily tasks, you don’t see the results immediately. It takes more time, sometimes could be months, to see the results and understand if you did a good job. The cool thing is that when the results come, they usually have much bigger impact than the small “daily wins”.
Receive less frequent recognition
While the upper item is about how you feel, this one is related to how people around you see your work and contribution. The situation here is very similar as above. Your peers can encourage you quite often about this great piece of code or algorithm you implemented. As a manager you receive recognition less frequently, because the results of your work are visible after much longer period. However, when you get to that point, most probably you have done great job and the results are bigger. Usually this involves the whole team, which has passed a significant milestone. That feeling is amazing.
Deal with people’s emotions
Many people say that management is all about emotions. I don’t fully agree with this, but definitely using your and other people’s emotions properly, plays a key role. If you want to be successful, you should be able to put yourself in other person’s shoes. Be empathetic — this is probably one of the most common advices for managers. I am trying to establish an emotional bank account with everyone around me. The key point here is to have a personal approach to everyone. People are smart enough to understand when you treat them in a “templated manner” and they hate it.
The hardest part probably are the difficult conversations. Everyone has tough periods or personal issues and you need to understand and support your people. But this shouldn’t reach to a level which affects the team in a critical manner. Sometimes you must tell people things they won’t like. Accepting this, however, requires some level of maturity and not everyone is having it. This results in emotionally-intense situation. I have had many sleepless nights because my mind was still reflecting on these situations. One thing I am still learning is how to “turn off” the negative emotions as early as possible.
But when you hear comments like “Thank you for urging me in the right direction” or “Without your help I wouldn’t have been able to take this decision” — for me this is priceless.
Final thoughts
Becoming a great people manager, requires shift in your values. Here are few examples:
- You should be able to put ego and self-interest aside and let your people reveal their potential.
- Illuminate the work of others, while demonstrating that you don’t need attention.
- When blame is needed, first think of yourself.
- Be authentic, show that you can make mistakes and admit when you are not right.
- Be present when someone needs your help.
- Have a positive attitude and use your sense of humor.
If you are not willing to do this, then managerial path is not for you. But once you adapt, you can see great benefits, not only at work, but also in life.
