Note: this blog is from 2021. No AI was used in its making and all opinions, mistakes, misspellings are my own.
I recently had lunch with an old colleague who is just breaking into tech management. He asked me if I had any advice for him as he starts the next part of his career. I’ve been asked that a bunch of times so thought why not actually write it down.
This is more geared for folks who have made that decision and are just getting their feet wet managing others, perhaps less than 6 months in. All of these little tips could be their own blogs or books by themselves, and many of them are.
So here are my five tips for new tech managers, things that I have taught other new managers:
- Listen — I’d say this is the number one skill in being a good manager. All of your human interactions are going to start with listening. You are solving problems through people and not machines. Practice Active Listening — there are a thousand guides on how to do this — but really it comes down to giving people the courtesy of showing you care through listening to their issues — work or otherwise. You will find that acquiring good listening as a skill pays dividends in other life situations as well. You have to first learn to listen and then you can listen to learn.
- Steal liberally and unabashedly — You aren’t reinventing the wheel. Others have already gone down this road to management, some of them are quite good. But what makes them good? Ask. Ask those managers, and also ask their employees. Steal, or more politely, “borrow” their secrets. Take the best parts of the managers in your company or in past jobs and roll it into your playbook. This also can work the other way, figuring out negative management traits and consciously not adopting them. Almost any positive managerial trait that I arguably possess I directly stole from others.
- Say goodbye to engineering — The sooner the better. Management and Engineering are two entirely different professions requiring different skill sets. Some of the skill set that got you into this position is still going to be relevant, but learning to say goodbye to engineering is a challenge for new managers. It is also not your job anymore to solve technical or architectural problems — that is the role of your engineers. Want to solve hard technical problems? Go back into engineering. The tech world is adrift in managers who really want to be engineers and overall tech management suffers from it as a whole.
- Your way is not the best or only way — This is a real challenge. When you first start out, you don’t know what you’re doing, so you lean on processes and skills that got you here. When you manage others, you find out that people solve problems very differently than you. Your initial urge is to correct them into ‘your way” because that is what you know and what you can control. Resist this urge! You will find out that how other people solve problems is oftentimes better than your way. And then you steal their methods going back to tip #2 :-).
- Always give others credit — This starts from day one whether you’re building a team or you inherited it. Selflessness is such a critical trait for good managers. The successes your team has are all due to their work, and their failures are all your fault — even if that is not the real truth, that is how the story should always be told. This counters advice I might give if you wanted to move up the ladder — but moving up the ladder can be very different from wanting to be a good manager.
Maybe in the next edition I’ll go through why any sane engineer or person would want to go into management in the first place.
