The Two Mountains
One of the reasons many ICs switch to managing is the desire to take a more strategic role, to have a seat at the table in the room where it happens. Unfortunately, becoming a manager comes with no christening of strategic authority. New managers often find themselves so overwhelmed with the new responsibilities, experiences, and relationships that come with supporting a team that the opportunity to think strategically seems perpetually out of reach.
I like to frame the path of growth for managers, and how to have more impact on the organization, as the climbing of two mountains.
The First Mountain
The first mountain you climb as a manager is learning how to support your team and take responsibility for their success. It’s like being a new parent, and you now have to learn to put the needs of others above your own so they don’t bump their heads on everything. You’ll learn how to be a better communicator, set expectations, and hold people accountable.
Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to the top of the first mountain. There is only one long winding path: putting time into the role, having a variety of experiences, and building your instincts. You’ll go through performance reviews, support an under-performer, help people through promotions, help others transfer teams, succeed and fail at giving recognition, and participate in great and terrible product reviews. Each experience you collect is a part of your learning process.
It’s important not to stress about the strategic chess you think you should be playing. The comfort of management won’t come tomorrow, by the end of the half, or even by next year. It will come over the long term as you try different approaches, encounter new situations, and make mistakes, a valuable and inevitable consequence of doing something new.
The Valley
There is simply no way to prepare new managers for how time consuming and stressful managing is. This is the valley. Between planning phases, performance reviews, conflicting meetings, one on ones, and last-minute product reviews, you are always dealing with multiple simultaneous demands. A never-ending barrage of the next thing and the thing after that. “If I only had more time,” you’ll sigh at your fully booked calendar. “Once we reach the next milestone in a week, this will all be solved,” you’ll tell your manager every other week. At the same time, you’ll likely be frustrated that you’re not in all the meetings you think you should be in.
Self-awareness is the key to getting out of the valley. It’s also one of the most important skills for a senior manager to possess, as the path ahead becomes more ambiguous and personalized for each person’s strengths.
How are you holding yourself back? Have you actually internalized the feedback you received? Do you not have enough time, or are you focusing your attention on the wrong things? Are you taking on too much work? Are you looking at problems in the right way in order to solve them effectively?
The Second Mountain
The second mountain you climb as a manager is driving the most important issues in the organization with humility. This involves learning how to operate at the right altitude (that’s a little mountain pun for you), find the big picture, and get to the smallest set of highest leverage decisions you can make to move the business forward.
The path up the second mountain, driving the most important issues to the business, is counterintuitive. Rather than building in more complexities and responsibilities, you should work on your ability to focus and communicate clearly.
There’s ever-growing complexity below you as you take on more responsibility and support more teams, which means you need to have ever-simpler language for knowing what are the most important issues. There’s likely one or two primary themes you need to keep in your head, that at the right altitude, all other decisions will fold into. You’ll repeat these over and over to the team as you help them understand why those concepts are critical. Any post about a reorg or half- or year-long plan is a means to articulate those primary themes.
As you become a more senior manager, your strengths and responsibilities will start to overlap with those of your peers, as you naturally gain the product, design, and technical skills needed to build products. You will feel pressured to adopt even more of those skills, becoming a better product manager or engineering leader if you’re in Design, or vice versa. However, the path is still counterintuitive — it’s not to become more like your peers, but rather, to lean into your strengths and experience. You should be looking for the decisions impacting your primary themes and your area of expertise (e.g. if you’re in Design, you have to be relentlessly focused on building a great experience), because that’s where you can add the most value. If you can trace a technical decision to your theme, then you know that’s something to go deep on with the engineering team. The same is true for business decisions, data, research, or marketing. That means if you can’t trace it, or you can trust a good decision will be made without you, then you can let it go. It may not need you, or it may be at the wrong altitude.
The other part of that climb up the second mountain is approaching difficult problems with humility. I’m often struck by the candor of leaders in small group discussions, and I think it would come as a surprise to many ICs and new managers. For instance, in a meeting of VPs at Facebook I was once in, in response to a tough question, one replied, “Yes, that is a challenge I’m dealing with. I would value feedback on how to solve that.” Openly and honestly discussing the problems you’re facing, with reasonable emotional detachment, gives room for others to contribute to solving very hard problems with you.
There’s a lot more to this model, the paths and tools that help you up those mountains, but having a high-level framing and a map to the mountain you’re on is a helpful way to chart your own growth. I’m confident that if you are struggling through some of these areas, and brought this to another leader to discuss, they would be able to build on a lot of this.