Do You Really Want To Be a Manager?
A post dedicated to eager professionals who want to take their first steps into management positions.
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
It is very comfortable for a manager to see team members with the ambition to go up the corporate ladder. Depending on the organization and how it prizes performance, this ambition can be the stability the team needs in the long run. Nevertheless, when we enquire where this ambition comes from, the typical root cause is only one: Money. Yes, manager-level staff might be better paid, but it might not pay all the downsides of this career choice.
There are many types of leaders and managers, and depending on the organization some might reinforce some bad stereotypical types of leaders. I am writing this post for the hard-working professionals, who have the ambition to move forward into a project or team manager position and share some bits of reality to help the decision of a very profound career change. Yes, changing from a technical path into management is a significant change in your tasks’ profile.
The elephant in the room: Payroll
Do you think the Project Management positions pay more?
Not exactly. This is no longer a straight answer.
Let’s have a look at hard data coming from the US. For this section, I am using Payscale and a Senior Software Engineer is paid an average 126k$ a year compared with 120k$ for a Senior Project Manager.
The problem with averages is that they don’t take into account industries and other bonuses based on objectives and performances, but they provide insight into the managing positions that are not implicitly better paid.
This means that IT Professionals who intend to focus on their technical path can be better paid without necessarily passing into a management position. As someone who dealt with payroll, I saw firsthand this gap not being true. Even if someone works for a company that values management positions the most, the gap might not compensate for the stress and burden of leadership, when compared to other positions with technical responsibilities.
Something is on fire! Congrats, your head is on display to higher management.
Is very common to hear a senior IT engineer sharing how many problems they need to fix in their day-to-day activity. It’s common for all levels and professions to handle a certain degree of being the contact point for specific problems.
What changes for someone with a Management position?
If there is a big issue with high visibility, they will contact a Project Manager first for the problem to be under constant scrutiny, for the team’s engagement to be aligned with the problem’s severity, and for all the relevant stakeholders to be informed proactively.
Typically a Manager becomes the preferred escalation point where an issue already is in its critical form. This point might be very similar to that of a Senior Engineer. The difference comes in the communication part. While (hopefully) the Engineer is working on the issue at hand, the Project Manager is managing stakeholders with status reports, communicating different strategies to fix an issue, and pushing back some distractions that ultimately don't fix the problem. A good Manager is like a guardian of the engineering team, giving them some breathing space to tackle and be focused on what matters. The problem is this job requires a lot of skills that are not learned in a programming course. It requires a lot of people management skills and, depending on the scenario, a lot of emotional intelligence.
And of course, the higher the problem’s visibility is, the higher you will get the attention of the corporate ranks. This works on problems being handled with great success, where the team should take all the credits, to scenarios that were a complete mess and a Manager should get evidence of what failed in the process. It is very easy to criticize an engineer when something doesn’t work. It’s the manager’s role to get facts straight and gather improvement points, instead of pointing to easy victims.
Once the person who fixed things, now you are the watcher (or at least you should).
To share a bit of my background, I have a degree in Business Administration and Management but I had a lot of experience as a Java programmer. This provided me with a special seat and perspectives from both technical and management early on in my career. In Business Management, we learned to be careful to promote very technical staff, due to the stereotype of promoting someone who might become a bad manager and losing a good technician. From the technical folk, the vision and the frustration were on having to be led by someone who doesn’t have a technical background and doesn’t understand the issues or solutions at hand.
I went from being the person who fixed things, to someone who needed to delegate the magic to someone else. The problem with highly technical staff who become “leaders”, is they might not delegate. The delegation part is a huge step towards becoming a true leader. Not only does the leader give the spotlight and a chance for others to shine, but experiences the stress of losing control of the execution. This last step can be one of the most stressful aspects of a leadership position. The hands-on part of the project or strategy, ultimately is executed by a team. Being on the sidelines and seeing everything unfold, like a football coach seeing the team performing on the pitch, is a different kind of stress that is only understood if someone experiences it firsthand.
Like in football, the manager’s performance is directly related to the team’s performance.
In contrast, if there is a problem on a project the manager gets a lot of heat from different stakeholders while giving space for this one engineer to extinguish the fire, who might have poor communication skills. (Or went out for a snack at a critical moment). That’s why a management position requires a considerable amount of emotional intelligence to provide feedback on the right moments with the right tone.
Mental health is a trendy topic and you get to know why
We already covered how a manager’s performance can be directly related to staff’s performance. The planning is a direct responsibility of the manager who needs to take information from the team and set it into the form of a plan, while its execution is mostly performed by the team. For a Sponsor or a Client, it doesn’t matter if a team is working on a Scrum or Waterfall, and they need clear visibility on when a specific set of requirements will be delivered.
Getting all the information from different parties, leading the team, taking the heat, and putting your name on all the milestones and commitments, can turn out to be a very stress-prone position. Especially if something doesn’t go according to plan.
Is a matter of time before a manager shares how the anxiety was managed in some past project or the physical impacts of all accumulated stress. I have known an example who got sleep disorders so intense that medication wasn’t working anymore, and the only solution was to get out of the managing position altogether.
The babysitting
People management is a great part of a manager’s life. It is by far one of the scariest skills to master because there are all kinds of people, with different personalities, needs, and ambitions. Also is very important for a manager to be always available to hear feedback from the team, even if that feedback comes at the busiest moment.
Imagine a manager handling a serious problem and chasing a series of engineers who can help, sharing different types of information and trying to define a path to a tangible solution. Suddenly, somebody else just sits near the manager and asks if he can interrupt (which he already did) with a request for a 2-day holiday next week. A random holiday request, on short notice, was not at the top of the priorities. However, a manager should kindly reply it will be checked later once a huge problem is being taken care of. Believe me, this needs to be said.
There are a lot of memes and literature regarding a Senior Engineer being interrupted all the time. The difference to a Manager is those interruptions can be related to people management and should be taken care of sooner rather than later. They count on the manager for their career planning, for helping with issues they are tackling, and even with some personal problems. The team counts heavily on one individual.
Remember, one of the main reasons why someone leaves the company is their boss. If you are a manager, or you want to become one, you might be that person who someone complains about after leaving the company. People management is a huge part of the role and is not an easy one to master.
As a final note, I want to shout out to
whose newsletter I came across. The covers topics around Product Management and also provides interesting insights into leadership subjects.For a sneak peek, I would recommend the post below.
Cheers,
Artur
Thanks for the shout-out! I enjoy reading your posts as well, they are a great source of inspiration.