Becoming a people manager is not a promotion
“According to the story, Damocles was pandering to his king, Dionysius, exclaiming that Dionysius was truly fortunate as a great man of power and authority without peer, surrounded by magnificence. In response, Dionysius offered to switch places with Damocles for one day so that Damocles could taste that very fortune firsthand.
Damocles quickly and eagerly accepted the king's proposal. Damocles sat on the king's throne, surrounded by countless luxuries. There were beautifully embroidered rugs, fragrant perfumes and the most select of foods, piles of silver and gold, and the service of attendants unparalleled in their beauty, surrounding Damocles with riches and excess.
But Dionysius, who had made many enemies during his reign, arranged that a sword should hang above the throne, held at the pommel only by a single hair of a horse's tail to evoke the sense of what it is like to be king: though having much fortune, always having to watch in fear and anxiety against dangers that might try to overtake him. Damocles finally begged the king that he be allowed to depart because he no longer wanted to be so fortunate” – the story of the Sword of Damocles
“Becoming a people manager is not a promotion” is a provocative statement that is also wrong — it usually is a promotion. What it means in this context is that you shouldn’t think of it as a promotion because it represents more than that. It’s a fundamental shift in the way you approach your job.
It’s happening again as the New Year rolls around — someone is making it their resolution to become a manager at work. Someone else, who achieved this resolution last year, is burning out as they realize they really, really, don’t like management.
Why is the goal of becoming a people manager so common? When I talk to people early in their career, these are the answers that come up most often:
People management feels like the thing you have to do to get promoted. The prototypical picture of “success” in business includes becoming a boss. Career progress is muddy and hard to define, but becoming a people manager feels like a clear milestone to aspire to.
You wish that you had better managers when you were on your way up, and this is your opportunity to be that manager for someone else. You may have a mental picture of the report-manager relationship where you teach your report, coach them through things you once struggled with, and generally be the guiding force you wish you had yourself.
It pays better and it makes it easier to get your next job.
I love management. I’ve been a people manager for most of my career and in a sense this entire newsletter is about the subtle and oft-unappreciated aspects of management that lead to results.
And yet…this shit is hard dude. Great management means getting power and influence but letting go of control and wading into the messy swamp of risk and human emotions.
What I don’t want to do in this piece is write a boo-hoo sob story about how hard and noble people management is and how hard and noble my job is and how that subtly makes me better than you, which is what I feel like these types of pieces often turn into. Manager jobs, IC jobs, they’re all hard to do at the top level. What I want to point out are some of the less obvious challenges that come with people management, in the hopes that it makes someone, anyone, have a good think about what they like and what’s “for them” in their careers.
This is for new managers, and it’s also for aspiring managers and for people who think management isn’t for them, because I think it’s possible for people in both camps to read this stuff and go “huh,” whether the huh is followed by “maybe that’s not for me” or “I actually think I can do that.”
Ok, first of all people management is not about managing people. It’s about my least favorite word in the English language.
“A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence Why? Because business and education and even surgery represent work done by teams.” – Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, writing in High Output Management
Why do managers exist in the first place?
This sounds like the sort of tongue-in-cheek question that your high school history teacher would ask on the first day of class (“what is history??” wow, food for thought), but stop reading after the bullets and come up with an answer to these two points:
Why not build a team by hiring motivated senior-level individual contributors who are all subject matter experts in their function and just turning them loose? Managers are often derided for meddling, for micromanaging, for not understanding the functions they manage, and for generally getting in the way.
Over time, what would happen to an organization that took this approach? What sorts of new challenges would this structure introduce (and are there ways to overcome them without adding a management layer).
This isn’t a fully hypothetical question, since there are high-profile examples of flat organizational structures (e.g. Google’s early years or Valve and their unique employee handbook). But most companies don’t go this route because it’s hard to get experienced self-organizing talent and communication breaks down quickly at scale. Google’s management has become more central and Valve stands as a special case worth serious study.
I’d argue that managers do not exist primarily to train employees, set deadlines, or project manage projects. Instead, managers exist because of the leverage they give an organization by vastly multiplying the value of what teams produce.
I dislike the word leverage because of the number of times I’ve had to edit it out of a press release (if you mean “use” just say “use”), but I’m using (leveraging?) it here in its useful context — where a small effort on one end creates a large output on the other.
The central premise of management is that coordinated people working in teams and coordinated teams working in an organization can produce vastly more and more valuable outputs than the same number of people operating outside a hierarchy. This…leverage…is created because the manager is an information broker across the organization, making it possible for their unit to build things that mesh with the output of unrelated teams and departments.
This is sort of a by-the-numbers way of looking at it, and there are people factors at play too — managers really do have to coach their reports, deal with emotional situations, give harsh feedback, celebrate wins, and do a lot of the other stereotypical activities of management. The point I’m making is that all management activities should be considered in terms of the value they create for the organization, because that’s what the job is.
I pulled a bunch of quotes I was going to use throughout this piece, but I just couldn’t find a place for most of them. Here are three that are relevant to these points:
“This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.” – Julie Zhuo, VP of Product Design at Facebook, writing in her book The Making of a Manager
“A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak.” – Michael Lopp, Sr Director of Engineering at Apple, writing in his book Managing Humans
“Here is my radical proposition: a business leader’s job is to create great teams that do amazing work on time. That’s it. That’s the job of management.” – Patty McCord, Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, writing in her book Powerful
11 non-obvious things that make management harder than most people expect
“Always the same principle was present: There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. However, a resolute and resourceful leader understands that there are a multitude of means to increase the probability of success. And that's what it all comes down to, namely, intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing in a competitive environment. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.” – Bill Walsh, writing in The Score Takes Care of Itself
Aspiring managers know about most of the hard parts of directly managing people. They probably understand that they’ll have to give harsh feedback, stick to deadlines, fire people, and do other things they aren’t overly comfortable doing.
If you take the “management is managing people” frame, those are the hard parts of management. As soon as you become a manager, though, you find yourself thrust into the “management is leverage and impact on the organization” frame, and that introduces a whole other list of hard situations to deal with.
Even new managers who are fully capable of dealing with these hard situations can be overwhelmed, because people don’t talk about this stuff and it tends to come as a surprise.
Enough preamble. Here’s the list:
You instantly have too many things to do. Pay attention to this bullet! This is the number one trap! You will enter many (most) days knowing that you cannot possibly get to the bottom of your to-do list. There is always more work, and this is actually a good thing. With an achievable list, it’s easy to work down the list (whether or not the activities are right). With an overwhelming list, you have to carefully prioritize your tasks based on what’s most important to the business and delegate tasks even when you will perform them better than your team. High achievers who become managers like to accomplish things, which often leads to missing this point and burning out while trying to do everything.
You have to have conversations about performance, and there are almost always shades of gray. When new managers imagine these conversations, they sometimes think “my report turns in low quality work and then we have a compassionate and thoughtful conversation about it.” But most of the time that’s not what happens because the quality of the work is more ambiguous — and it’s hard to know the line between giving one-off feedback and having a sit-down conversation about long-term performance. What do you do if your report turns in amazing work, consistently 3 days behind schedule? What if they do good work when you assign very specific, narrow tasks, but can’t take initiative on their own? What if their work errs on the good side of acceptable, but never goes beyond that? There are no universal answers.
You have to have hard conversations not necessarily related to performance. What happens when one of your reports has a health crisis, or a death in the family? What happens when they’re doing well but want a promotion you can’t give them? What happens when upper management puts the kibosh on their project and it totally sucks?
The manager has to figure out how to spend their time, and it’s tantalizingly, poisonously easy to slip into spending it on the things that you like doing or know how to do well. Which can easily result in micromanaging your direct reports or taking on all the project management — not high-leverage activities for the organization.
Training your reports is great, but there’s usually not a ton of time to do it and give detailed feedback. Even when you give detailed feedback, your reports aren’t always ready to take it the way you want them to. Different people learn differently, and you as the manager have to adapt to them — you can’t necessarily teach to the ideal of the report-manager relationship you wish you’d had if that’s not a good fit for them. Plus…
You will eventually manage people who do things you cannot do, which is uncomfortable, since you probably initially got promoted due to your skill as an individual contributor. This will force you to let go of IC work, and will lead to an ambiguous adjustment period where you’ll feel uncertain about the scope of your job.
You as the manager have to stay emotionally steady. Sometimes shit stinks and you and your team are all going to be upset by it. Sometimes you’re dealing with emotionally charged situations that you hate being in. You’ll empathize and you’ll say the right things, but it’s hard to have to be the person who nudges the team towards its next step. A lot of people find it exhausting and not for them.
Management is not primarily about your relationship with your direct reports. It’s about creating the output needed for the organization, and that means stepping away from your team in service of the next two bullets…
Your relationship with other managers is the most important part of your job. Your team will need resources from other teams, other teams will need resources from you, and the work you do affects each other. Even if you ignore the exchange of resources, your role as a manager is to gather information from other areas of the organization — you can have the birds-eye view that your team, being closer to execution, is missing, and it lets you connect dots, come up with ideas, share information, and solve problems in a way that isn’t possible otherwise. Time spent on this can feel unproductive (another one-on-one?!) in the moment, and you will often not get what you want.
You are building a team, not a group of individuals. The relationships between your direct reports are more important than their relationship with you. You want your team to be able to self-organize and solve their own problems, or else you’ll become crushed under the weight of your own to-do list. But it’s terrifyingly easy to become the “source of answers” for your team, which will result in everyone coming to you for everything. Your team can do more than they expect, but you have to facilitate relationships between them and help them set their own goals without becoming the point of failure.
You are responsible for everything that happens on your team. When you’re an IC and someone doesn’t pull their weight, it’s frustrating. When you’re a manager, it’s your fault even when it isn’t literally your fault. You are responsible for all the performance of every member of your team, and usually that means all the underperformance (on a great team, the team members get the wins instead of the manager). You carry the weight of the performance of a function instead of the execution of work, and that’s a big, sword-of-Damocles-style shift.
Management can be amazing, just know what you’re getting into
“I think one of the primary mistakes that leaders make in team building is in believing that they have to be the sole provider of leadership. Great teams have multiple leaders, multiple voices. A major part of building a team is discovering who those voices will be and cultivating them, making sure that their leadership is established within your group.” – Coach K, writing in his book The Gold Standard
I love management. I never want to leave. I love watching a team come together to solve a problem, run a campaign, get a win — all without any of my direct instruction. Building teams like that is hard and takes discipline in every interaction (with reports, with peers, with bosses), but it’s worth it. It creates results for the company, and it creates opportunities for every member of the team to step up and grow in their own careers.
But again, it’s not for everyone. I believe, dear reader, that you are perfectly capable of doing everything in this article — personally, I try my best — but unless you actively enjoy the “manager skills” you could find yourself realizing that the goal you worked so hard to reach is burning you out.
Don’t treat management as the next rung on your career ladder. Careers are less linear than ever, and although it may not be clear what a non-management approach to growth in your career looks like, that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
If the idea of management still excites you (or maybe even excites you more) that’s great! I wish you the best of luck in 2023, and you can always reach out if you’d like to chat about teams, careers, or people.