Transition To Manager Position
At some point in career, everybody has to face this dilemma. Should I transition to manager position or not? What are the pros and cons?
HBR: Are You Sure You Want to Be a Manager?
Are You Sure You Want to Be a Manager? mentions following topics to be considered:
- Bigger stage, new challenges, opportunities to lead people.
- Loss of tribe: Working with same team as manager, where you used to work as a team member may make it difficult. Setting up the new expectations with authority in the same group is challenging. There is also sense of loss of friendship.
- Loss of simplicity: Now the simple world of a developer needs to be transformed to quite complex world where project management, team management, collaboration with different teams need to handled. Ownership level from task based ownership goes up to project level.
HBR: How to Know If Someone Is Ready to be a Manager?
How to Know If Someone Is Ready to Be a Manager also helps in understanding changes required for this transition.
- Delegation
- Giving up individual contributor duties and taking up leadership role
- Giving up micro-management and looking at big-picture
SE-Radio Episode 306: Managing Programmers
SE-Radio Episode 306: Ron Lichty on Managing Programmers is very specific for managers in software industry.
- Trade offs:
- Give up the developer world where you can isolate yourself while coding, instead now keep yourself always available for team members.
- Give up ability to dive deep in programming, debugging the issues and getting the joy from making things work. Instead, now you have to enable the team to get that joy. Remove the hurdles, help them to make progress, provide feedback from customers about their work.
Dear HBR Show: Do you have what it takes to be a manager?
Do you have what it takes to be a manager? episode has discussions about query from listener about accepting a manager post. Instead of just focusing on yes or no, this discusses aspects of opportunity to being in big changes and options to time limit, redesign the position if needed.
My Thoughts
On personal level, major trade-off while transitioning to manager role in software industry is to give up the joy of coding to certain extent. However, a manager can always take up non-trivial coding tasks which will not block any other team members or impact project deadlines. Apart from this, what I have found beneficial is to work on some self-initiative (may be some productivity tool) in spare time.
Other thing which can help is to pro-actively reach out to other managers to understand the challenges and seek their advice on how to handle those. Each one has unique offerings in this learning experience. Also, to identify your own management style and then molding that according to team needs would help.