We talk about management being a career change for engineers, so it’s no surprise that first-time managers need a lot of coaching. As you may remember from your first time managing a team, you don’t know what you don’t know. You probably did whatever good managers had done with you in the past, if you had a good manager to emulate. Perhaps you got a little training or read a book like this one, but more likely you muddled your way through it. Unless, of course, you had a good manager yourself helping you learn the ropes.
Spending quality time with your new managers is important, and you should expect this to be an up-front cost that pays long-term dividends for your organization. You may think that because a new manager has people skills she’ll automatically be good at the job. The new manager may believe this as well! But you know there are a number of skills to being a good manager, and even people with solid people skills will need some training to get there.
When you’ve hired or promoted a new manager, you’re often eager to let her loose completely over her team. Finally, that team is no longer your direct concern! Unfortunately, your new manager can be shockingly clueless as to even the basics. Running 1-1s, for example, is an intimidating experience the first time you do it. What do you talk about? How do you give feedback? How do you keep track of takeaways? No book or training can replace you spending some time asking your new manager how her 1-1s are going, and seeing what questions or challenges she may need help with. Sometimes, you just need to remind her to hold them in the first place!
In the face of a new and daunting job, some people just won’t do it. When your new manager doesn’t manage and slips on too many management details, her team starts to suffer, which means that you start to suffer. When people start quitting because their manager hasn’t given them a career path or isn’t inspiring them, it’s ultimately your responsibility. Use skip-level meetings to help you detect areas where you need to support your new manager fully, and let her know that you’ll be holding skip-levels frequently as you help to guide her most effectively.
One common sign of a struggling first-time manager is overwork. A new manager who is working all the time is probably failing to hand off her old responsibilities to other people on her team, and so she’s attempting to do two jobs at once. It’s one thing for her to be a bit busier, especially as she gets the hang of the new responsibilities, but it’s another thing to see her coming in early, staying late, and writing emails all weekend. It’s amazing to me how many people never quite learn how to let go of tasks and so are just constantly working longer and longer hours. Make it clear that you expect the new manager to hand off some of her old work, and help her identify opportunities to do so.
Overwork is also often a sign of another new manager danger: the person who thinks she’s now in control, the taskmaster of the team, responsible for making all of the decisions. Managers who neglect the job are bad, but managers who take to the job with gusto because they believe it’s the key to realizing authority are sometimes even worse. A manager on a power trip domineers her team, and a skip-level meeting with more senior members of the team will reveal their frustration that they have no ability to make decisions themselves. This is slightly different from but related to the micromanager, who expects detailed reports from every member of the team at all times. The micromanager annoys her team to death by asking for an unnecessary level of detail. The control freak takes away the team’s ability to make any decisions and views her job as assigning specific work to people to be done. Control freaks usually have bad relationships with their peers in product management and other tech teams, because they often fight to make decisions alone instead of collaborating. What’s worse, control freaks often want to hide what they’re doing from their manager for fear of having that control taken away. If your new manager is skipping your 1-1s or evading questions about what the team is working on, you may have a control freak on your hands.
The new manager you’re training should be ultimately making your job easier by more than just taking the responsibility of doing a bunch of 1-1 meetings off your shoulders. She also needs to be on top of the team’s performance and delivery, guiding them to focus on their goals and deliver results. Sometimes new managers fail to realize that they are now responsible for this delivery, and believe themselves helpless in the face of challenging goals or product roadmaps. It’s not your job to nag the new manager, to remind her of what she’s committed to do, or to hold her hands through the basics of team planning every time it needs to be done, but you will need to coach her through this process at first. Clearly set the expectation up front that you’ll hold her accountable for the team, and help her build the skills to achieve this.
First-time managers are tricky because if they truly don’t have the willingness to learn and aptitude to become solid managers, they’re a big problem. Making the wrong person a manager is a mistake, but keeping her in that position once you’ve realize she’s wrong for it is a critical error. I am hugely in favor of making engineers who wish to go into management take baby steps of mentoring and managing very small teams, but this is not always possible and doesn’t always shake out problems that come with scale. Control freak managers, for example, don’t often show up as clearly in smaller management situations, instead holding that impulse back until they feel they have the true authority of title. Keep an eye on your new managers. You may need to provide not only coaching but strong corrective feedback in the first six months.
Beyond the coaching that you’ll need to provide your first-time managers, I recommend seeking out additional external training. If your HR team has a curriculum for new managers, make sure yours are given the time to attend, and encourage them to do so. You may also seek out additional training opportunities outside of your company, such as conferences that focus on technology leadership, or programs run by current and former engineering managers to specifically address technical leadership topics. New managers are usually eager to learn the tricks of management, and professional programs can help get them up to speed.