The Two Mountains
Many ICs switch to management believing they’ll be more strategic, more influential, and more impactful. The reality, though, is becoming a manager doesn’t christen you with strategic authority. New managers are often so overwhelmed with new responsibilities, situations, and relationships, that thinking strategically seems perpetually out of reach. You constantly feel reactive rather than proactive.
How do you grow, build influence, and become more strategic as a manager? It comes from climbing two mountains.
The First Mountain
The first mountain you climb as a manager is learning how to support your team and be responsible for their success. New managers are like new parents, learning to put the needs of others above their own, helping their kid not bump their head on everything. It’s a shift from contributing as an individual to contributing as a leader.
Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to the top of the first mountain. There is only one long, winding path: gaining experience. You need to spend time in the role, try new things, and build 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 is a badge of honor as you continue to climb the mountain. Along the way, you’re learning how to be a better communicator, set clear expectations, and hold people accountable to them.
Don’t stress about the strategic chess you think you should be playing. Your comfort as a manager won’t come tomorrow, in a half, or even in a year. It will come over several years as you try different approaches, encounter new situations, and most importantly, make mistakes, an inevitable consequence of doing something new.
The Valley
There’s no way to prepare new managers for how time consuming and stressful management truly is. This is the valley. Between annual planning, performance reviews, conflicting meetings, countless one on ones, and last-minute product reviews, you’re always dealing with several simultaneous demands and fires. A never-ending barrage of the next-big-thing, and more meetings, and even when you don’t want more meetings, you hear about meetings you should have been in. “If I only had more time,” you’ll sigh at your fully booked calendar. “Once we get through this bit of chaos, I can work on those big-picture projects,” you’ll tell your manager every week.
Managers escape the valley through self-awareness. First, recognize that you’re in the valley. Then, be curious. Are you in the valley because of the chaos around you, or because what worked before doesn’t work any more?
How are you holding yourself back? Have you actually internalized the feedback you received? Do you not have enough time, or is your attention on the wrong things? Are you taking on too much work, or are you not prioritizing appropriately? Are you looking at problems in the right way? Are you expecting your manager to do things they’re expecting you to do? Who can you ask for help?
The Second Mountain
The second mountain you climb as a manager is driving important issues in the organization with humility. This means learning how to work at the right altitude (that’s a mountain pun), see the big picture, make important decisions, and help the move the business forward.
The path to the top of the second mountain is counterintuitive. Rather than searching for more responsibilities and impact, this climb is about focus, using your strengths, and refining your communication skills.
As you take on bigger responsibilities and support more teams, you need ever-simpler ways to focus on the most important issues. Find the biggest decisions and actions that will have the most impact. Champion themes to how your team should operate, and repeat them over and over to help them understand why they’re critical. When you write about a reorg or a plan, you’talk about how it contributes to your organization’s goals, decisions, and themes.
As you become a more senior manager, your strengths and responsibilities will overlap with your peers as you gain the product, design, and technical skills needed to build great products. You’ll feel pressured to develop product management and engineering leadership skills if you’re in Design, or vice versa. However, you shouldn’t become more like your peers, but lean into your unique strengths and experiences. Look for the decisions affecting your work and area of expertise (e.g. if you’re in Design, be relentlessly focused on the customer experience), because that’s where you’ll add the most value. If you can trace a technical decision to the customer impact, you’ll know that’s something to work with the engineering team on. The same is true for business decisions, data, research, or marketing. If you can’t trace it, or can trust a good decision will be made without you, you can let it go. It may not need you or it may be at the wrong altitude.
The climb up the second mountain requires humility. New managers and ICs may be struck by the candor of leaders in small group discussions. For example, in a meeting of VPs at Facebook I once attended, in response to a tough question, a VP replied, “Yes, that is a challenge I’m dealing with. I would value feedback on how to solve that.” Openly and honestly discuss the problems you’re facing with your manager, peers, and partners. Approach them with emotional detachment, to give room for others to contribute to solving hard problems with you.
There’s more to this model, the paths and tools that help you climb these mountains, but knowing the map 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, they could build on this with you.
