How do you feel at the end of the day these days? If you’re like many new full-time managers, you probably feel quite drained. Even though you didn’t write a lot of code — or any code! — all day, when you get home you find yourself with no energy to decide what to eat for dinner, no energy for hobbies, and the desire to eat comfort food, drink a beer perhaps, and stare blankly at the computer or TV until it’s time to go to bed.
The first several months of managing multiple teams can feel like a death march, even when your hours are not excessive. Your once-focused attention gets sliced and diced between the various meetings that pepper your day. I lost my voice repeatedly during my first few months managing multiple teams; I was totally unused to talking so much every single day. A friend of mine recently became a director of engineering, and she had to start having an assistant order her lunch because she discovered that she would forget to eat — and had no energy to decide what to eat when she realized she needed food.
So, first, the bad news: the only way out of this situation is to go through it. In fact, I would expect most people to go through this for a while. If you haven’t experienced it at all, either count yourself extremely lucky, or double-check to make sure you’re really paying attention to everything that needs your attention. In my experience both going through this transition and managing people in it, if you don’t feel a little bit overwhelmed, you’re likely missing something.
The best way to describe the feeling of management from here on out is plate spinning. If you’re not familiar with it, plate spinning is a fancy form of juggling where the juggler has several poles, each with a plate spinning on top of it. The juggler must attend to each plate before it slows down enough to fall off the pole. Your plates are the people and projects you’re overseeing, and your job is to figure out how much attention each one needs at what time. It’s important that you approach this spinning with a student’s mind. You’re still learning how to spin plates, and you’re going to drop some on the floor because you’ve neglected them for too long. Honing your instincts about when to touch which plate is the name of the game.
Now for the good news: you’ll get better at this over time. Your instincts will improve. You’ll start to recognize the early warning signs of projects that are going poorly, people who are getting ready to quit, and teams that are underperforming. I recommended in the last section that you think carefully about dropping out of meetings, and part of the reason is that those meetings are where you learn what healthy and unhealthy dynamics look like. This is also why I strongly advise you maintain your practice of regular, reliable 1-1 meetings with everyone who reports directly to you. If you have too many people, you may need to shorten those meetings or hold them biweekly instead of weekly, but skipping 1-1s because you’re too busy with other things is a great way to miss the warning signs of an employee who is going to quit.
I called this section “Decisions and Delegation” — so where does delegation fit in? Delegation is the primary way you claw yourself out of the feeling of having too many plates spinning at once. As tasks come at you, ask yourself: do I need to be the person who completes this work? The answer may depend on a few factors (see Table 6-2).
| Frequent | Infrequent | |
|---|---|---|
Simple |
Delegate |
Do it yourself |
Complex |
Delegate (carefully) |
Delegate for training purposes |
The degree of complexity and the frequency of the task can act as guides to determining whether and how you should delegate.