jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #113 on 12 Mar 2022 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other
Everyone’s a great manager until they start managing - Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale, Raw Signal Group
Four mistakes I made as a new manager - AbdulFattah Popoolah, LeadDev
What you give up when moving into engineering management - Karl Hughes, Stack Overflow Blog
When we see people do a different job than we do — especially when they do it very well or very poorly — it’s easy to think “that doesn’t look so hard”. Plumbing, graphic design, customer-facing roles; we watch for a while and figure “I could do that”. And you know, we probably could, eventually. Because it is way harder than it looks, for almost any value of “it”. Competence is hard-won. The people performing those roles are avoiding (or ignoring) a lot of potential problems we’re not aware of, with background knowledge we don’t have, deftly performing practiced tasks that we’d botch the first dozen times through.
It almost always takes us much longer than we imagine to claw our way up to a basic level of competence in a new field. In areas where the feedback loop is slow, it can take still longer. Absent prompt signals to the contrary, you can quickly get into Dunning-Kruger territory where you fool yourself into believing you’re doing much better than you are.
And, well, welcome to leadership and management. When I and others say “management isn’t a promotion, it’s a career change”, this is what we mean. It’s a whole ‘nuther job, where your experiences from your previous job help but also hinder you.
The Nightingales have a nice article that’s hard to summarize, but I like their section headers as an overview - “In theory it’s easy.” “In practice it’s hard.” And, crucially, “The management is in the doing”. Good management - assuming you’re in a reasonable situation where success is possible - is a learnable set of skills and behaviours, that have to be done and redone until they’re practiced. And then have to continue being done. You will keep developing mastery of those skills for as long as you keep working at it.
(In our line of work, Management isn’t the only “looks easy; after all, I’ve been on the other side of it and know what not to do” profession we get thrust into. Teaching and training is another set of extremely important activities that people spend their entire life studying and learning. And we get tossed into it with zero education or support.)
Popoolah talks about the big categories of mistakes he made as a new manager (which overlap quite a bit with my “Help, I’m a Manager” talk). Fundamentally, he didn’t know what the job was, so he had trouble doing it. He didn’t have a clear vision for the team; he had trouble giving constructive feedback; the first departure on his team threw him for a loop; and he kept trying to be a team lead instead of a manager. It’s a good short summary of the problems a lot of new managers face.
Hughes talks more concretely about the things that are given up on the management path: focus time; short feedback cycles; conflict avoidance; making technical decisions; and staying up to date technically. It doesn’t have to be given up forever — I’m back on my third tour of duty as an individual contributor! — but those are just not part of the job of a manager.
