Questions to ask yourself, ways to try it before you jump, and personal stories to help you decide
My first question is why? The motivation is key.
There are 3 common motivations: Money, People, and Impact. There are ways to explore these motivations and try out parts of people management before you take the leap. One of the best ways to learn is from other managers' experiences. So here are some of my own.
I want more money
This motivation is usually stated in different ways, such as the following
- I want a promotion
- I want a raise
- I want the potential for greater raises
- I want to have a more senior title
It is okay to want more money. Do not be ashamed to admit this. If you value your salary, you should actively pursue more money and advocate for yourself. However, the desire for more money is not a good enough reason to become a manager. Usually, a situation where people want to become managers only for money indicates a problem with the career pathways available in an organization. Shopify recently identified a problem with the motivation in their corporate structure and reworked it. They observed, "In most companies, people can only advance by climbing the corporate ladder, often forcing them into management roles that steer them away from their true passion - their craft." This phenomenon is known as the Peter Principle which is the principle that members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach the level at which they are no longer competent.
Be aware if this may apply to you. Becoming a manager should not be simply a raise. It is not a simple scale-up of a senior engineer's role. It is a full role change.
With that out of the way, let's dive into other motivations to become a people manager rooted in what the role actually entails.
I want to help people grow
People are the most complicated part of being a people manager. The guidance I was given by multiple managers when I was mulling the decision was
"Being a people manager is like becoming a parent. You can read all the books in the world but it will never prepare you."
People are hard.
One of the biggest complications of people is performance management. I have formally performance-managed people and entered them into the official corporate machine's process. I have also had to handle behavioral patterns that impacted the team. Sometimes, it is not so serious yet, but I catch a problem and provide coaching and feedback to the person before it becomes an officially documented situation.
I know of two senior engineers who decided not to become a people manager because they realized they could not stomach doing this. One senior engineer tried the role for 6 months. As is normal with a manager transition, they had 2 direct reports and a project. Throughout that project, it became clear that one of the engineers was not delivering as expected. They were an incredibly eager and amenable human, but they were slow to code and made mistakes rooted in misunderstandings of foundational technologies, like javascript. The senior engineer took on the coaching, setting up weekly 1–1s to handle it. But they found that giving feedback and verbalizing 'you are underperforming and need to improve' was incredibly stressful. It was very personal for them. This is not uncommon. The other individual, who had already been offered multiple internal opportunities to transfer to a people manager role, decided against it after merely overhearing a performance conversation between a manager and her direct report. Her direct report disagreed with the assessment and the conversation became heated.
I have made mistakes and I have doubted myself. You may deal with behavior that is not clear-cut. I once managed someone who was always just on the verge of underperformance and there were always reasons to go along with it. Health concerns and illness. New to the role. Spent a lot of time onboarding an intern. Had trouble with their development environment and got blocked on the ability to code for days at a time. I had to ask myself "Is this person just more vocal about their problems or are they particularly poor at finding ways to unblock? No one else seems to run into this as much." But after time, the feedback and the evidence were consistent: this person was constantly delivering less. There were fewer pull requests (PRs), even after accounting for time off. The complexity of the PRs was not high. Fixing existing tests, building using existing patterns, and minimal impact. I considered the reasons I saw for the underperformance and had to ask myself "Are these reasons or are these excuses?" I worried that I had not set up this person for success. I put together a performance improvement plan. When I shared the plan with them, they brought up all the reasons why their output was low. I told them they were not performing and we set expectations for work and deadlines within 2 months. They hit all the deliverables. Their peer feedback improved. So I told my manager and my HR partner that the problem was resolved. But in 3 months, after they transferred to a sister team, their new manager saw the same behavior I had seen. They put them on another plan. The engineer took a leave of absence. It was only then, after another manager put them on a performance plan, that I felt truly confident in the decisions I had made months before to performance manage them. That taught me that if you see a problem, address it early. It takes more than 2 months for a consistent underperformer to demonstrate that they can sustain performance. The problem was not resolved when I thought it was. I had misevaluated.
Your relationship with people as a manager is not the same as that of a peer
I was working from home once when my mom came to visit. She overheard some of my meetings and 1–1s throughout the day. For years, she has had little context on what I do and could only conceptualize it as "you are the boss of people", which feels like a very 1990s corporate way to view the world. After that day I worked from home, she remarked
"That was very interesting. You are a coach, a therapist, and a manager."
The therapist
Some people will use you like therapy. They feel it is important to open up to you at a personal level because they value this connection. Even if you do not feel the same, you may need to find a way to reciprocate or at least make them feel heard. Others just need to try to work out their thoughts and they invite you to be a part of the process- talking at you until they find an understanding. You must be patient and you must be kind. But you must also be professional. Keep your empathy and humanity. But a manager is not a therapist. You will have to make hard choices and and deliver difficult messages. It is never the kind thing to delay or soften hard feedback or bad news.
When people tell you they struggle with personal issues such as illness, ADHD, or anxiety you must learn to respond appropriately and also extend the right level of trust and support to your team member.
When people tell you something in their home life is adding extra stress and burden to them, you must also extend trust and support. People are ultimately adults and responsible for themselves and as a manager, you are not responsible for your team's personal life. If someone is not performing, you must be accountable for it while trying to balance that they are not punished for having a life outside of work.
There are some things you can do to offer support as a manager If your company supports medical leave, encourage people to take it. If they are not taking their vacation, encourage them to do so. If they are not showing up at the level they need to be, tell them as soon as you see it. If there are options for a role change that would be a better fit for their work life balance, you can try to support them in that journey.
The coach
People managers function like a team coach. You identify strengths and weaknesses in your team members then strategize to figure out the puzzle of putting the right person in the right place at the right time to deliver the best outcome. You will sometimes need to make hard decisions about who gets to work on what projects, which projects are prioritized, and decide who to delegate what to. They will talk to each other. And they will sometimes be frustrated with your choices.
Your direct reports may want to be your friend. You may want to be their friend. This is a very difficult line to toe and it is often better not to try it. Your friendships with people will not make your team's decision-making easier. If you Google 'how to be friends with your team as a manager' you will find a whole host of people analyzing the topic, including this article from Harvard Business Review which cites that 70% of first-time managers lost friendships in the transition.
This relationship also impacts how others judge your decisions when it comes to promotions, raises, and other scenarios where people can directly compare to one another. I have witnessed people sour and distrustful of their leadership's judgment due to their close friendships with some of their direct reports. Whether it was true or not that their judgment was compromised did not matter because others on the team perceived it to be. This eroded trust is very difficult to rebuild.
The manager
As a people manager, your team and your team's culture are a reflection of you. This is reinforced because what your team delivers is what you deliver.
People will leave your team. You cannot take it personally when people leave the team. Nearly 100% of the time, people choosing to leave the team are very uncomfortable in delivering the message and on the verge of apologetic. They are afraid that you will see it as a denouncement of you or the team you run.
I have cried when people left my team. Typically, I do not take it personally when people leave. But sometimes, you realize the reason the reason they are leaving is a flaw in how you have handled your team. For example, on one team some of my engineers did not get along to the degree that I had to behave like a parent. These two people could not be in a meeting together with the rest of the team present without supervision. Their tone of voice and demeanor towards each other were tense and created a feeling of anxiety. Unfortunately, I didn't catch this issue soon enough and one person left the team because she thought it was too toxic. That was a difficult reason to hear and it sticks with me to this day.
How can you explore growing people in your current role?
I share all of the above, not to dissuade you from your path, but to be very candid about the responsibility you are taking on when it comes to people management. People are real and there are real-world consequences. You cannot git revert a performance review. I highly encourage some self-reflection and real-world exploration.
Growing other team members is something senior engineers are in a fantastic position to accomplish. Senior engineers have the experience and the expertise to mentor their peers to help them improve their knowledge base, learn new skills, and hone their workflows and best practices. They can hold regular 1–1s and pair to provide a lot of guidance and look out for their teammates.
What senior engineers do not have to do is performance reviews or performance management. They may be partners in this- they absolutely should be giving feedback and their manager will ask for it. And they may be asked to help mentor or coach an underperforming teammate. But a manager bears the brunt of putting that performance management plan together. They will deliver most of the difficult to hear feedback. This is mostly optional for a senior engineer.
Here are some opportunities to look for in your current role. Work with your manager to try these out. You do not have to be a senior engineer to participate.
- Be someone's onboarding buddy.
- Be an intern mentor.
- Join a mentorship program as a mentor.
- Officially, or unofficially, mentor someone. You may already have a bond with someone
I want to have more Impact
Personally, one of my main reasons for becoming a manager was I wanted to have more control over the roadmap of what the team delivered. I thought I should consider a product manager role to achieve this. When I shared that idea with my manager, he told me
"Engineering managers have 3 levers at their disposal to influence the roadmap: resources (people), scope, and timelines. Product managers can only influence the Scope and the Timelines."
He was correct. As a manager, I have had a great deal of impact on the team's roadmap and decision-making power.
People
Managers are responsible for delegation. They know how much effort projects take and they can choose to put people on a project or not. I can carve out time for projects and advocate for their impact and importance to the team and the business. There are many times when I have pushed for a particular project or initiative to have time to build because it was the right opportunity for someone or because it would deliver a beneficial feature to our users.
Scope
Managers work closely with their UX and Product partners to determine what is feasible in terms of time and technically possible. They are also responsible for parts of the roadmap that are not always covered by the product team such as technical investments and technical debt. The health of systems is up to the engineering manager.
Timelines
Only engineers (or product managers with excellent intuition and experience) can set the real build timelines. I spend a lot of time building out timelines and working with my engineers to put together accurate estimates. This is key to my role as a team lead. If I see that the proposed timeline is too tight, I may recommend that the timeline be used as a forcing function to reduce the scope of the project. Or I might advocate that the scope is correct and that we need more time or people.
How can you explore expanded decision-making in your current role?
Senior engineers are usually expected to have strong decision-making skills when it comes to the implementation and design of features. They can also manage the scope by providing reasonable estimates and offering alternate options for solutions. Many senior engineers also work closely with their product and UX counterparts to break down a problem and solve it. They often prototype together. Because engineers are builders, they can quickly provide proofs of concepts and move out of theory into real working examples. This is a powerful tool.
The most influential senior engineers have well-developed product sensibilities. They understand the users and the product they are building for well enough that they can come up with ideas and improvements independently. Take time to explore your product and look for opportunities to improve it. What is your vision for the product? Can you prototype it?
Have you already considered being a product manager?
It is worth considering this particularly if you do not have a strong interest in technical decision-making such as architecture and implementation. It is also worth considering if you are not yet prepared to take on the people part of a people manager role because as a product manager, you can remain an individual contributor. The best way to explore this is to speak with other product managers. If after speaking to them, you are still encouraged to make the role change, seek out support for the role change. Find out if there is an opportunity to trial run as a product manager.
The 4th Motivation: I just want to try it, it seems [insert your descriptive phrase here]
Does management seem like fun? A challenge? A learning opportunity? These are all valid reasons to make changes to your career. This is the fourth big motivation people have to become a people manager.
The only way to find out the truth is to try it. I came into management from a more junior position than some. I was not yet a senior engineer myself which was a risk to my ability to succeed. I was fortunate to have a manager willing to sponsor my transition and take a chance on me. There are a few key things that you should look for to succeed as a first-time manager.
- Mentorship
- Support of your manager and your organization
- Reasonably scoped projects
- Reasonably scoped team
Mentorship
It is incredibly hard to become a people manager. What makes the difference for managers is experience. Experience takes time and time is linear. The best way to gain more time is to wholeheartedly borrow ideas from other managers on how to run their teams. Take their planning processes and observe how they tweak them. Try it with your team. Find a style that fits you.
Support
Support of your manager and your organization may look partially like mentorship. But they need to set you up for success.
Remember that manager who sponsored my role transition and took a chance on me? She was a fantastic mentor, asking me the right questions and adjusting my thinking. Then she had a great opportunity and left 6 months in, just a month after my new role became official. Suddenly I had 10 reports instead of 5 and I was running a massive multi-year-long project instead of one part of it. I learned a lot quickly. But I also made critical errors in stakeholder management and expectations which long term set me up for a difficult path that led me to leave the company. Among other problems, I realized too late that there was an expected delivery date which I missed by quite a bit. I had no experience managing that scope of work or level of expectation. It was a critical error.
Reasonable scope
This leads me to points three and four. Have a reasonably scoped project and a reasonably scoped team. My first project was a reasonable size: to deliver a single web page with an uncomplicated set of features. My first team was 5 people who were mostly performing positively. They were reliable with kind and professional temperaments. There were no immediate challenges to people managing, which meant I could focus on delivering the project
This kind of setup gives you space to fail and make mistakes. The impact of the mistakes is not felt too strongly. It is a safe learning environment.
Final takeaways
- Money alone is not a good reason to become a people manager
- Do some self-reflection and try your hand at finding opportunities to grow your impact and your coaching skills in your current role. Then reflect again
- Try it out. Seek mentorship and a good opportunity.
Good Luck!
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