Being A New Manager Glue Work And Key Skills

This resource first appeared in issue #30 on 26 Jun 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

New Manager Training: The 4 concepts to Teach - Claire Lew, Know Your Team
Being Glue - Tanya Reilly

If you’re at the point where you’re starting to manage (or develop) team leads or managers, Clair Lew’s article and collection of resources on four things to teach new managers is useful.  Her four concepts to teach (which she covers in details with resources to use to to teach them are):

• The mindset shift: IC → Manager.  (This is so important; no promotion or job change is as tough a transition as your that move from IC to manager - and I say that after switching fields from astrophysics to genomics!)
• The importance of trust
• 1-on-1 meetings are your most high-leverage tool as a manager
• Answer the questions, ”What’s going on?” and ”Where are we going?” for your team

Tanya Reilly’s talk focuses an aspect the first one - that as a manager, an increasing amount of your time is spent doing “glue work” rather than the technical work of the team.  And while that glue work is necessary for everything to come together (and stay together), it isn’t as valued as the technical work.  So much so that ICs stepping up and doing that glue work aren’t seen as overreaching or as promotion material, but more often as being less capable than the ICs focussed on the nuts and bolts of their tasks.