6 Unconventional Facts You Learn After Your First Year of Being a Manager
You’ve finally got your well-deserved promotion to a leading role. You are very excited and a little bit scared. You are well prepared, you have been leading smaller projects and were an unofficial leader among your peers, you read books, took classes but this is your first formal leading role. People usually think only about good things that dream-came-true job brings and tend to forget that everything you do has its own a fly in the ointment.
First of all, welcome to the rookie club. I am sure you got this promotion because you were good in whatever you were doing. Great developer, extremely skilled tester… You worked to reach that level for years. You practiced every work day for at least 8 hours last 5–10–15 years. You have tons of tips and tricks in your sleeve, you know how to solve each problem because you did something like this many times already.
Now it’s all gone. It doesn’t matter anymore. You have zero years or experience. You probably even forgot how to be a junior. It might take you by surprise, and no matter how well you are prepared — it will be stressful. Each task will take more time than it should, each decision will be more difficult because you are doing it for the first time. You don’t expect a kid out of college to perform on the senior level, so you cannot do it as well. The bad news — there is no other way except to practice and make mistakes, and practice and continue to learn and build your set of tools day after day to become an expert. Good news — each 1:1 will be easier, each solved issue will teach you what to do and what not to, each mistake will make you smarter and each task will be done faster and better every time you do it.
Second, you are not the part of the pack anymore. You are the boss. You now the one who leads. You need to be ahead, strong, confident, blazing the trail even if sometimes you don’t feel like doing it. Your new peers might support you but sometimes problems you need to solve are very different from those which other leadership members have so you cannot rely on them or look for advice (for example, smaller companies often have one QA Manager and many Developers’ managers). The result of all of it — loneliness.
Bad news — the higher you go the less number of peers you have. Good news — you still have them, and even if no one in your company does the same line of job, you can find such people outside. Meetups, conferences, LinkedIn discussion — look there for help, ask for advises and tips. Just don’t do it alone.
Third. Now you need to watch your emotions and your mouth. People listen. People remember what you say. Even if you don’t feel calm and cheerful and excited about some crappy news, you still need to come to your team and tell them that everything is fine, and we can do it, and bla-bla-bla… in three months half of the department will be fired, but you guys don’t worry we are still doing good… at least 50% of us… Something like that. Imagine if your boss come to the meeting and started crying, or panicking, or yelling? Not good, right? So, keep calm and continue to look at things from the positive side. Bad news — shit happens all the time and you need to be an example for your team. Good news — pretending being calm makes you feel better and teaches you to manage stress better. Finally, you get used to it.
Fourth — dealing with sh*t all the time. The higher you go more shit you deal with. All the good stuff is staying down, smaller crap is resolved by your team without your help, and only when shit really hits the fan you need to step up. Good news — there is no good news. Just kidding, dealing with shit is also a skill, you will learn it, and, in some time, you will know all the variation of taste of it and will have set of tools and techniques to solve issues. Bad news — it is still a shit.
Fifth — negative feedback. It will be the most difficult part of your job, unless you are heartless cold-blooded bastard who loves to hurt small animals. Sooner or later you’ll need to give negative feedback, or fire somebody. You need to deliver bad news or criticize somebody without hurting them. Even if you provide constructive feedback and deliver it like the news about the winning a lottery you’ll still feel bad. Even worse — if after your constructive feedback your employee gets aggressive or starts crying. You know that you are right and all you said was well deserved but still feel like, you know, shit. Bad news — it’ll always be difficult, and I have no good news for this point.
Sixth. Your team will not always like your decisions and will critique some of them, just because people have different opinions, different background, knowledge and skills. Although you should listen to all concerns and critique and, if feedback is valid, improve your work or adjust your decisions, you should remember: a) you are in charge not because you have beautiful eyes, but because you earned to lead these people, it’s your responsibility to make decisions and you are the one who is going to deal with the consequences of the decision, not them, b) before you do something you don’t have that experience and knowledge that you have after completion of this task. Just because it is impossible. Critiquing somebody’s is much easier than doing something. Try to read a book and critique it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Now try to write one, not the bestseller, any book. Most likely you will not even finish first page. Bad news — you cannot make everybody 100% happy about each and every your decision. Good news — actually bad news is the good news, you need to hear different opinions, you need to have discussions, even if they sometimes are heated, to see things from the another point of view and make right choice.
And finally — being in charge is exciting. It’s roller-coaster type of exciting but it still is. It’s a freedom to change things, to do something that you and probably others have never done before, to bring all the cool ideas you always had to life. So go ahead, lead and have fun!
