I have been in the software industry for more than two decades. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that most people stumble into leadership roles rather than deliberately planning a path to it. Much of it is attributable to the quickly changing nature of technology. One day, you are happily coding away; the next day, your manager leaves at the exact moment your company's business is taking off, your boss's boss does a battlefield promotion, and BOOM, you are it! I can almost guarantee that most manager promotions in pre-IPO companies are battlefield promotions.
This post is a quick self-evaluation that any aspiring manager can take to determine if they really want to be a manager or not. Note that the evaluation does not determine whether you will be successful as a manager. There are a lot of great managers who don't want to be in the role, and there are many terrible managers who have been in the role for decades. Think of this evaluation as a self-reflection that you can go through to quickly determine if management is for you or not. Obviously, the more honest you are, the more accurate the results will be. Remember, no one else is looking at the results besides yourself, so be as self-critical as possible.
Q1: Do you easily share credit?
A: Y/N
Q2: Do you easily forgive and forget?
A: Y/N
Q3: Do you like exploring adjacent disciplines? E.g., if you are a software developer, do you feel comfortable doing some QA? If you are a product manager, do you feel comfortable doing some design?
A: Y/N
Q4: Does clarifying ambiguity energize you?
A: Y/N
Q5: Do you embrace production support/customer support when the need arises?
A: Y/N
Q6: Do you try hard to keep up with the pace of the industry but feel you are perpetually behind?
A: Y/N
Q7: Do you easily embrace conflict?
A: Y/N
Q8: Do you understand the key business metrics of the company/team you currently work for?
A: Y/N
Q9: When your team misses deadlines, do you feel bad?
A: Y/N
If you answered Y for most of these questions, a people manager path is probably worth exploring. There is no guarantee that you will be successful in it, but the initial signs look promising. Let's unpack the questions and the ethos behind it a bit further.
Do you easily share credit?
One of the things I coach new people managers is to get comfortable with giving and not getting praise. If you are addicted to the quick hits of dopamine that praise provides, then a people manager path is probably not for you. Plays that managers run are long games. It isn't like writing a nicely written piece of code or a requirements document. Managers make moves that will show results in months and years, not hours and days. In the past, I have seen results show up after I left the company and moved on. Here is a simple thought exercise to prove my point: Who is more popular, Patrick Mahomes (age:28) or Andy Reid (age:65)?
People managers do what they do because they derive satisfaction from their long-term positive impact on the company. They do it because they want their people to succeed and grow. They are motivated from within.
I am sure many of you reading this are thinking aloud, 'Yeah, sure, I can do this. ' Trust me, it is not easy. A consistent piece of feedback that I have gotten from newer people leaders is that they don't feel appreciated and they don't receive enough praise. You can't expect praise after executing each play. You get the praise after all your plays ladder up to something meaningful for your company. Players can be praised for the effort they put in, but not coaches. Coaches can only claim long-term wins.
Do you easily forgive and forget?
People management is an emotional roller coaster. Peers, bosses, and employees will question your ability to lead regardless of which company you work for. You will have to fight for scope, budget, promotions for your people, etc, which means you will be disagreeing with a lot of people. If you are the type of person who holds grudges and remembers the names and faces of everyone who has ever done any wrong to you knowingly or unknowingly, you are probably not a good fit for a people manager role. Many managers find this out after, realizing that all the baggage they kept stored away in their minds will one day cause an emotional cave-in, resulting in them lashing out and other nasty consequences. The best managers don't hold onto the baggage. They easily forgive, forget, and move on.
Do you like exploring adjacent disciplines?
We are moving into a world where people managers are expected to manage increasingly heterogeneous teams. For example, engineering managers manage teams with front-end, back-end, and SRE engineers. Product leaders are already managing teams with product managers, designers, research analysts, etc. So, how do good people managers manage folks with various specialties and backgrounds?
With curiosity.
They are intensely curious about how things work. With curiosity comes knowledge, and with knowledge comes humility and respect. If you are curious about a specific discipline that you don't have training in, you ask questions instead of making assumptions and passing judgment. This is what great managers do. They develop empathy and respect for the function (and the person) they are not skilled in by learning about it as much as they can, but they operate through constraints, guardrails, and outcomes as opposed to directives. For example, suppose your SRE team wants to use Kubernetes and comes to you for your blessing, and you don't have a background in operations or systems engineering. You don't tell them yes or no; instead, give them guardrails, constraints, and outcomes to drive towards that will help them make their own decision. For example,
Does the organization know enough about this solution to ramp up on it quickly? If not, what is the cost?
Why do we believe this solution is better than others? What other solutions did the team look at?
Can the team deliver it in under three months?
Will this fit inside our budget of X?
Additionally, you learn as much as you can about Kubernetes from the web, figure out success and failure stories from other companies, and help provide your team with perspectives they might be missing.
Does clarifying ambiguity energize you?
I am sure this is another topic where most readers would go, "Ambiguity…pfft…I eat ambiguity for breakfast". As a people manager, the project and roadmap-related ambiguities will be more complex than what you are used to as an IC, primarily because of the increase of stakeholders in the mix. If you are an IC, at the most, you are dealing with a handful of stakeholders, and you can safely ignore most of them, but as a people manager, you will be dealing with bigger, more opinionated, and very powerful stakeholders who cannot be ignored. You have to hear everyone's voice, alleviate everyone's concerns, and convince the naysayers to disagree and commit. And for large initiatives where everyone wants to grab a piece of the pie for various reasons (territorial, glory etc.), this process can and will get exhausting. Exhausting but rewarding if you are willing to play the long game.
Do you embrace production support/customer support when the need arises?
This applies to anyone aspiring to get into a leadership role. Are you willing to do what needs to be done, including taking lashings from random people? Are you willing to get on the phone with an angry customer and help them out?
Creative folks tremendously struggle with this. They can connect instantly with other like-minded creative folks but not so much with the customers who are not expecting creativity but service. They want their products to work consistently. They do not care about the CAP theorem. Will you be comfortable explaining why your system went down and convincing them it won't happen again (when you know it's impossible for a distributed system to have a 100% uptime) to someone who doesn't understand distributed systems?
Do you try hard to keep up with the pace of the industry but feel you are perpetually behind?
The tech world is a quickly evolving world with evolving workforces. In my time as a manager, I have managed boomers, Gen Xs, Millennials, and Gen Zrs. I have also seen the evolution of the tech world, mainframes, distributed systems, the cloud, the mobile revolution, the AI boom, the SAAS explosion, and so on. If you want to survive as a leader and a tech manager, you must always stay in learning mode. Learning not just about technology and product trends but also workforce trends, pop culture, socio-economic developments and nuances, etc. Managing a Gen X employee is way different than managing a Gen Z. In people management, especially in the tech world, it is never one-size-fits-all. Your core management philosophies might stay the same, but the playbook will vary from company to company. If you contrast that with an IC role, you just have to worry about one-half of the equation. If you are a product manager, you just have to worry about keeping up with product and customer trends. You can easily shake your fist at the young-uns and tell them to get off your lawn. You can't do that if you are a product leader managing product managers of various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. So, if you are comfortable (ideally, like) staying in perpetual learning mode, a people manager role is for you.
Do you easily embrace conflict?
This is another way of asking, "Do you avoid conflict?". This one doesn't need a ton of explanation, but in short, yes, people managers deal with a sizable amount of conflict. Conflict with employees, peers, bosses, executives, customers, other departments and so on. To be clear, I don't think anyone is born with an innate ability to navigate and resolve conflicts. It is definitely a skill that can be learned. However, if you are considering exploring a management path, you have to walk into it with your eyes wide open when it comes to conflicts. You will be expected to embrace it, navigate it, and resolve it. I have mentioned in earlier posts about using conflict management tenets to resolve conflicts, but here are the core tenets for reference-
Never shy away from conflicts. Yes, It will be uncomfortable, but you, as a leader, are obligated to lean in and find a path forward.
Display a high level of emotional intelligence. Never become passive-aggressive or aggressive.
Have a cause and conviction.
Base your arguments on sound business judgment, not your personal opinion.
Validate your assumptions with your peers, your manager, other teams and against industry standards.
There are no absolutes in life or business, be ready to compromise. We all live in an imagined reality.
Do you understand the key business metrics of the company you currently work for?
Here is a thought exercise. For the projects you work on, do you care more about the craftsmanship and quality of your individual work than the overall impact on your company? Do you understand how the work you do translates to overall success for the company? Do you know the trends of the success metrics? The best managers can draw a clear line between projects their employees are working on and the success metrics of the company. Managers who fail to do that will be left with a team that cares more about the craftsmanship of their work than whether it contributes to the success of the company or not. To be fully transparent, not every team does this well, but teams and managers who figure this out will have a much easier time aligning their team's motivation to the company's success. Here is a story one of my old bosses told me about twenty years ago. My boss's manager, the department head, used to manage the trading systems for a large brokerage firm. The department head would pull a weekly report of all the trades and associated fees that went through his system, highlight the dollar amounts that contributed to the company's revenue in bold, and send it to the CEO. He never missed his bonus.
When your team misses deadlines, do you feel bad?
Ooooh, I can feel the hackles of the readers going up as they read this question, which looks like a pointy-haired boss wrote it. Here is a thought exercise. If you are an IC reading this, think about the project retrospectives you have been part of. Do you bring up missed deadlines? Do you nudge the team into pathways that will enable the team to deliver faster? If you are asking these questions right now or are wondering why nobody else in the team is asking those questions, a career in management might be the right move for you.
For good or bad, most companies are driven by capitalism. They exist to build products that the public will pay for at a price that is financially meaningful for the company's shareholders. Success in a capitalistic world is determined by urgency, invention, ingenuity, the occasional sacrifice, and some luck. Newer managers often forget the rules of the game they have decided to play. If you want to become a successful manager, you have to show a track record of consistent, financially meaningful delivery of products and services through your team. And you can't be consistent if you are not constantly adapting to the evolving market conditions around you. You have to continuously raise the bar.
However, there is another way to look at this, which is not purely capitalistic in nature, and that is to continuously raise the bar to just become better as a team. Most teams stay together for a limited time, at the most two years. Why not make it the best team you have ever worked in? A team that can move fast, delivers value to the business, continuously becomes a better version of itself, and takes care of its people is a great team to be a part of. If the idea of continuously raising the bar for your team is appealing to you, a path in management is worth considering.
One last piece of advice….if you decided to completely ignore all of what I said above and jump into management, that is ok too :)
P.S - If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues!