How To Become a Manager Coming From a Technical Role
A Quick Guide To Help A Career
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 out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
I am writing for the warriors of corporate world who battle every day to understand what they're missing for that long-sought-after promotion. I've known and worked with a very large number of professionals who were doing everything right but never landed a Management job. In contrast, other colleagues migrated between management and technical roles many times, as if they just needed to show up in the morning to get promoted.
If you're an aspiring Mark Zuckerberg who has created a startup, or if you currently work at a unicorn, this article might not be for you. In the startup world, a developer can easily become a procurement manager simply because there's no one else to send an email requesting a contract extension. If this is your situation, congratulations, but you're kind of cheating! (Also, promotions are expected to happen faster in startups compared to more mature companies)
I will cover some examples that I have experienced and seen working in various contexts. However, if you are aiming for a promotion to a management role, it's important to look at these tips through the lens of your own reality and how they can be applied. I'd be happy to help or hear your thoughts by commenting below, sharing your experience.
Starting With The Ecosystem
Not all companies are created equal, and not all have the right environment for promotions. I've worked on projects where some colleagues waited years for a promotion, and despite their great work, it never came to fruition.
This is especially true in highly competitive environments (I don't want to call out four major consultancy firms). There are simply not enough management roles for everyone, and some variables benefit a small number of people to a great extent.
It's crucial to analyze your workplace and find examples of colleagues who have moved from a highly technical role, let's say a developer, to a management position. The main goal is to perform an assessment:
Does the company have a tradition of promoting people from technical backgrounds into management, or was a significant portion of the management layer recruited externally?
Was there a specific time period when most people were promoted to management, with very few promotions happening after that historical event?
Are the management positions offered by the company truly management roles, or are they simply technical positions with minimal management tasks?
Understanding the environment is critical for determining if the company is even open to promoting its own employees. I've worked in companies where the entire management layer was composed of people who started as developers, and I've worked in other companies where promotions were highly unlikely and spaced decades apart rather than years.
In this article, I won't address what is right or wrong. What’s important is to convey that a company's environment is highly influential in the possibility of a promotion, no matter how hard you try.
Finding The Right Opportunity
Once a company's ecosystem is clear and you see that people have been promoted in recent months or years, the focus shifts to your specific project or team. What are the chances of your work getting recognized and having the possibility to move up the corporate ladder?
If the company has a history of promoting its employees, that’s great, but there are always exceptions. My goal is to help you (the reader, or a friend you share this article with) avoid being on one of them.
For example, I've seen a case where a company opened a new branch in a new country, and within the first couple of years, several colleagues from that branch were promoted. Except for one specific team.
The reason for the stalled careers of so many good employees was that the department's management decided to have a different philosophy from the rest of the company. If they needed a new project manager, they would bring someone in from elsewhere in the company (ironically, someone who was promoted a few years prior) or recruit from the market.
My point here is simple: Make sure your team isn't an exception to the rest of the company. Look out for other "motives" that might be blocking the advancement of the best performers.
Vocalise The Ambition
Seriously, if you (or your friend) want to get promoted, just say it out loud to your manager.
Unfortunately, many good professionals don't vocalize their ambition and expect a promotion to magically appear despite their good work. This rarely happens.
When an opportunity arises, decision-makers not only consider the person who has shared their ambition but also analyze the impact if that person doesn't get the promotion. Believe it or not, the risk of losing a key team member can sometimes be a leverage for a promotion, even if it requires some fine-tuning of the responsibilities.
Vocalizing your ambition also enables your manager to guide you on which aspects you should improve. Having a coaching approach can significantly increase someone's chances of being promoted and help solidify the idea that the person can become the manager's backup.
Communication Is Superior To Technical Skills
This is where a lot of people fall short.
Having great communication is more than "speaking a lot". Actually, there are a lot of managers who are happy not having the spotlight of a meeting or discussion. Communication is said to be the number one skill, but it is hard to quantify.
Here are some easy tips to be perceived as a good communicator:
Send status emails periodically (weekly?) and in a short format. If an email needs a scroll to be read, it might already be too much. Nobody wants to read a big email unless it's from the CEO (Because someone probably screwed up, and everybody is reading only to search if their name was mentioned somewhere).
Avoid reporting a problem without a solution. Anyone, literally, anyone on the planet can state what is wrong with a particular event. The differential factor is in the quality of the solutions that are provided.
Ticketing System? Add comments, even small ones, about how the ticket is evolving. It shows initiative and ownership of the methodology. Those comments are read more often than people think.
Have a good relationship and communication with stakeholders outside the team. When working with other teams or clients, it is important to become visible. To become some sort of reference. Nobody will promote John, who doesn't know anyone on the team that sits two rows in front of him. But they probably will promote Sandra, who organized a technical workshop with the right people about a dependency between two systems.
Avoid speaking fast (This is my personal battle!). In meetings, try to speak in a moderate pace, unless the meeting is almost over and you really need to capitalize on available time.
Communication is not a "word count" competition. It is how someone conveys a message, how it's perceived, and if it's seen as part of the solution.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur