Reflections on Becoming a Manager
Last year after rejoining Google, I became a manager for the first time. As a long-time IC, I had some preconceived beliefs about what the job would be like, many of which were wrong.
During this transition a mentor pointed out one chapter from Nine Lies about Work about how humans are terrible at objectively rating other’s behavior. The result is that your entire work life is filtered through the lens of your manager’s point of view. I think this is something anyone with a boss has experienced: a great one can make your life amazing, and a bad or nonexistent one can make it a living nightmare. The saying “you don’t leave a job, you leave a manager” has rung especially true in my journey.
Before I started, I did some reflecting on the things managers did that I either liked or disliked over the course of my career.
Things that managers did for me that I liked were: finding projects that would stretch me, even if it was clearly outside my current capability and they were taking a risk in assigning me; showing actual interest in my career development; creating a sense that we’re working on something new and groundbreaking together (which we were); and bringing the team together over something special (fancy dinners or desserts, travel).
Things that managers did that I didn’t like were: giving me vanilla MBA textbook advice; seeing that I’m stuck on a project and not helping; secretly deprioritizing me; overriding my preferred way of doing things without good reason; and immediately shooting down my ideas without fully understanding them.
When I actually became a manager, a few things changed right off the bat. As expected, I started having way more meetings. This wasn’t a huge issue for me as I remember The Manager’s Path and The Making of a Manager both emphasize that as a manager, in some sense the meetings are the work, and to treat them that way in terms of preparation and focus.
I wasn’t prepared for the challenge of maintaining context and alignment throughout my teams. Previously as an IC, all I had to worry about was my own work and sometimes exerting “soft power” to get things done. I (naively) assumed my manager was this omnipotent super-being who understood and silently judged and guided everything going on around me. The reality was quite different: even with weekly meetings, I had to spend a lot of effort maintaining context and alignment throughout every member of my team. It took more effort and a different kind of work to be able to offer valuable support to the team. As I grew into the role, I found that building trust and distributing decision making power were my friends in reducing the complexity of maintaining this context.
For better or worse, throughout my career I had made enough mistakes and been burned by enough bad projects that I now have pretty strong opinions and boundaries around running healthy and happy projects and teams. There are times when IC’s can’t push back on things themselves (or won’t in fear of their careers) – one area I found myself growing a lot as a manager was identifying where and when I needed to step in and say no to people or set team boundaries.
A little tip one of my great previous managers taught me was “leaving a pause” in 1on1s to draw out conversations. Leaving a slightly awkward gap in the conversation creates a vacuum that might draw out topics that otherwise the person may not have volunteered so easily.
Other things that helped: Google’s re:Work Training, Debugging Teams, re-reading The Manager’s Path, The First 90 Days, and Engineering Management for the Rest of Us.