Should You Become a Manager?

Advice for high performers in any company

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Since starting my own business as a leadership coach, I’ve spoken with a lot of folks who are at a crossroads in their careers. Should they become a manager, or should they continue to pursue excellence in their craft? Are those paths mutually exclusive? If not, how can they do both?

For many, this can be a very nebulous, stressful decision. There are only a few people I’ve spoken with who’ve known without a shadow of a doubt which path they wanted to take (I was not one of them, surprisingly).

After hearing from so many struggling with this decision, I’ve told each of them the same few things.

Management is like starting over completely

People nod when they hear this, but I still see so many new managers get really surprised by just how incompetent and unsure of themselves they are at first. For instance, being someone’s manager in a 1:1 is much different than being the person venting to their manager in a 1:1. Learning the ins and outs of an organization — what motivates different people, who really makes decisions on a team, who you can ally with on certain things, which team members tend to be blockers, and how to navigate them — is a huge shift from delivering a wireframe or some code. Coming up with processes for tasks like recruiting, instead of simply participating in other people’s processes, can be tough. Finally, learning that everything you do and say is being scrutinized more carefully than ever can be incredibly daunting.

Being a manager is not a higher-level version of the job you had before — it’s an entirely new job and an entirely new way of working.

Not becoming a manager limits your upward mobility

Whenever I hear a company claim that they’ve figured out how to parallelize the manager and contributor (non-manager) tracks, I raise an eyebrow. It mostly turns out to be bullshit.

Sure, a lot of companies nowadays do have some parallelization in their tracks. But ask them to name a VP or director-level equivalent who is not a manager, and I’ll bet cash money that 99.9% of the time that person or role does not exist (and is…