Leading People With Experience

This resource first appeared in issue #47 on 23 Oct 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

Leading People With Experience - Mark Wood

A common issue - one in retrospect I’m sort of surprised didn’t come up in the recent “Ask Managers Anything” round - is what to do when you’re placed in a position of managing or even being team lead someone with more experience in the job that you have.

This happens all the time, and it especially worries new managers or team leaders who haven’t quite understood the role yet - in a software developer team they might think of the manager as “top programmer” who makes the technical decisions, in which case managing someone who is an even better programmer (say) seems impossible. But that’s not what managing research computing teams is about! It’s a bit closer to the truth for team lead positions but even there that’s not the goal.

Wood has four areas of advice

Fight the impostor - yes, you can be an excellent manager or team lead of someone more technically experienced than you.
Recalibrate your expectations - understand what is and isn’t your job as a manger or team lead, and why you don’t need to be the top programmer to be an effective lead
Talk about the elephant in the room - don’t pretend the age and maybe technical skill differential doesn’t exist, but don’t obsess about it either
Bias towards coaching - perhaps you can’t mentor the skilled hire in a technical area (although is it true that they know everything better than you?) but you can coach them on applying their skills, or in career development, working as part of this team on this project, etc.