Over the course of my two decades in the software industry, I have come to realize that most people stumble into leadership roles rather than deliberately plan a path to them. Much of it is attributable to the quickly changing nature of technology. One day, you are happily coding away; the next day, your manager leaves at the exact moment your company’s business is taking off, your boss’s boss does a battlefield promotion, and boom, you are it! I can almost guarantee that most manager promotions in pre-IPO companies are battlefield promotions.
Here is a quick self-evaluation to help determine if you are truly ready to be a manager. Note that this doesn’t decide whether or not you will be successful as a manager. There are a lot of great managers who don’t want to be in the role, and there are many terrible managers who have been in the role for decades.
Do You Easily Share Credit?
One of the things I coach new people managers to get comfortable with is giving praise and not just receiving it. If you are addicted to the quick hits of dopamine that praise provides, then a people manager path is probably not for you. Plays that managers run are long games. It isn’t like crafting a nicely written piece of code or a requirements document. Managers make moves that
will show results in months and years, not hours and days. In the past, I have seen results show up after I left the company and moved on. People managers do what they do because they derive satisfaction from their long-term positive impact on the company. They do it because they want their people to succeed and grow. They are motivated from within.
Do You Easily Forgive and Forget?
People management is an emotional roller coaster. Peers, bosses, and employees will question your ability to lead consistently, regardless of which company you work for. You will often have
to fight for scope, budget, promotions for your people, and so on, which means you will be disagreeing with a lot of people. If you are the type of person who holds grudges and remembers
the names and faces of everyone who has ever done any wrong to you, knowingly or unknowingly, you are probably not a good fit for a people manager role. Many managers discover this after realizing that all the baggage they carry in their minds will one day cause an emotional breakdown, resulting in them lashing out and other unpleasant consequences. The best managers don’t hold on to the baggage. They readily forgive, forget, and move on.
Do You Like Exploring Adjacent Disciplines?
We are moving into a world where people managers are expected to lead increasingly diverse and heterogeneous teams. For example, engineering managers manage teams with front-end, back-end, and site reliability engineers (SRE). Product leaders are already managing teams with product managers, designers, research analysts, and so on. So, how do good people managers manage folks with various specialties and backgrounds? With curiosity.
They are intensely curious about how things work. With curiosity comes knowledge, and with knowledge comes humility and respect. If you are curious about a specific discipline that you don’t have training in, you ask questions instead of making assumptions and passing judgment. This is what great managers do. They develop empathy and respect for the function (and the person) they are not skilled in by learning about it as much as they can, and they operate through constraints, guardrails, and outcomes as opposed to directives.
Does Clarifying Ambiguity Energize You?
As a people manager, you will find the project and road-map-related ambiguities to be more complex than what you are used to as an individual contributor (IC), primarily because of the increase in stakeholders in the mix. If you are an IC, at most, you are dealing with a handful of stakeholders, and you can safely ignore most of them, but as a people manager, you will be dealing with bigger, more opinionated, and very powerful stakeholders who cannot be ignored. You have to hear everyone’s voice, alleviate everyone’s concerns, and convince the naysayers to disagree and commit. And for large initiatives where everyone wants to grab a piece of the pie for various reasons (territorial, glory, etc.), this process can and will get exhausting. Exhausting but rewarding if you are willing to play the long game.
Do You Embrace Production Support/Customer Support When the Need Arises?
This applies to anyone aspiring to get into a leadership role. Are you willing to do what needs to be done? Are you willing to take a call from an angry customer and assist them? Creative folks tremendously struggle with this. They can connect instantly with other like-minded creative individuals, but not so much with customers who expect service rather than creativity. They want their products to work consistently. They do not care about the strain your servers are under. Will you be comfortable explaining why your system went down (to someone who doesn’t understand distributed systems) and convincing them it won’t happen again (when you know it’s impossible for a distributed system to have a 100 percent uptime)?
Do You Try Hard to Keep Up with the Pace of the Industry but Feel You Are Perpetually Behind?
To survive as a leader, you must always remain in a state of learning. Learning not just about technology and product trends but also about workforce trends, pop culture, socioeconomic developments, and nuances, and so forth. Managing a Gen X employee is quite different from managing a Gen Z employee. People management is never one-size-fits-all. Your core management philosophies might stay the same, but the playbook will vary from company
to company. If you are a product manager, you only need to worry about staying up-to-date with product and customer trends. You can easily shake your fist at the young’uns and tell them to get off your lawn. You can’t do that if you are a product leader managing product managers of various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. So, if you are comfortable staying in perpetual learning mode, a people manager role is for you.
Does It Bother You When You Have Arguments with Your Team?
This is another way of asking, “Do you avoid conflict?” People managers often deal with a significant amount of conflict, including conflicts with employees, peers, bosses, executives, customers, other departments, and so on. I don’t think anyone is born with an innate ability to navigate and resolve conflicts. It is a skill that can be learned. However, if you are considering an exploration of a management path, you must enter it with your eyes wide open when it comes to conflicts. You will be expected to embrace it, navigate it, and resolve it
Do You Understand the Key Business Metrics of the Company/Team You Currently Work For?
For the projects you work on, do you care more about the craftsmanship and quality of your individual work than the overall impact on your company? Do you understand how the work you do contributes to the company’s overall success? Do you know the trends of the success metrics?
The best managers can draw a clear line between the projects their employees are working on and the company’s success metrics. Managers who fail to do that will be left with a team that
cares more about the craftsmanship of their work than whether it contributes to the success of the company. Not every team does this well, but teams and managers who figure this out have a much easier time aligning their team’s motivation to the company’s success.
When Your Team Misses Deadlines, Do You Feel Bad?
If you are an IC reading this, think about the project retrospectives you have been a part of. Do you bring up missed deadlines? Do you nudge the team into pathways that will enable them to deliver faster? If you are asking these questions right now or are wondering why nobody else in the team is asking these questions, a career in management might be the right move for you.
The Endgame
For good or bad, most companies are driven by return on investment. They exist to build products that the public will pay for at a price that is financially meaningful for the company’s
shareholders. Success in capitalism is determined by urgency, invention, ingenuity, occasional sacrifice, and a bit of luck. To become a successful manager, you must demonstrate a track record of consistently delivering financially meaningful products and services through your team. And you can’t be consistent if you are not constantly adapting to the evolving market conditions around you. You must continually raise the bar.
However, there is another way to look at this, which is not purely capitalistic in nature, and that is to continuously raise the bar to just become better as a team. Most teams remain together for a limited time, typically no more than two years. Why not make it the best team you have ever worked in? A team that can move quickly, deliver value to the business, continually improve, and take care of its people is a great team to be a part of. If the idea of constantly raising the bar for your team appeals to you, a path in management is worth considering.
