Becoming a Manager: Only Decide Work
When I became a manager, I held onto things I was doing as an individual contributor. I held onto them so tightly that I affected the team’s output.
In my mind, I was a great contributor - that’s why I am the manager. I did my job well and now I can lead the team too. What can go wrong??
Well, I learned first hand the organization has different expections for managers’ time and I have a limit to the number of hours in a day to work.
On one hand, I had my old job, that still existed: contributing at a high level. On the other hand, I have a new job: leading the team and representing company’s interests - that is new to me.
Let’s say, I stayed contributing at the same level for awhile. Taking the big features just like I did before.
I slowly realized I didn’t have the same amount of time to craft my result as well as before. I submitted subpar results, something I would yell at other teammates for, yet, I would give myself a pass on.
What’s worse, because of the authority of my new role, team members would not push back, letting subpar code through the process - that led to bugs from my code.
Of course, debugging code takes more time than to create the code. I didn’t have enough time before to write the code, I have even less time to debug the code.
This is where I learned as a manager, I can only decide on the work not do the work at the same level as before.
The main constraint is time - the organization expects me to take my high level of performance to guide team members to that level, a multiplying factor.
When I stopped doing the work and just decided what work the team to do, life was better.
- I didn’t block team because they were waiting for my code.
- The bugs that came up are from their code, not mine.
- The team worked together and got things done.
I assisted and supported them whenever I wasn’t meeting with other leaders. This made things easier for everyone.
“Only deciding the work”, an essential perspective shift when going from a individual contributor to a manager.