Your work plus more

For a manager, the deliverable is a sum total of deliverables of the team members, including your own. Almost always, a new manager also tends to retain a significant part of the work he used to do as an individual contributor. So you not only have to code your own module, but also look at the quality, completeness, and delivery of the work from your team members.

Less definition

As an individual contributor, a lot of what you do is defined well, for example, a specific software module to write or a set of issues to fix. Your primary responsibilities are your own deliverables. As a manager, the work that arrives at your door may require further definition and also need to be broken down into executable units, so it can be understood by your team and executed well.

Multiple roles

As we know from Chapter 1, Whose Side Are You On?, a manager plays various roles, and you get to spend time on many of these various activities. For example, as a liaison role, you may be invited to a meeting on a new architecture discussion, or as a resource allocator, you may spend time working with the IT department to get new hardware for your team.

Much of the time spent on these other activities goes unaccounted for.

Indirect tax

As a manager, you are responsible for making sure everybody progresses. You will spend time trying to unblock somebody. This unblock activity may be simply debugging some code, or de-mystifying a customer issue, or working with an external team to get the dependencies delivered.

Most of these unblock activities are unplanned, and will show up on a daily basis. Once again, time spent here goes unaccounted for.

Scope of work

When you become a manager, the scope of work gets wider. As an individual contributor, you could get deep into one area and that would help solve many problems. However, as a manager, you may have too many things in different areas to be able to find the time and dive deep into any of the areas. The skill needed to manage multiple areas is very different from the ability to dive deep, just the way that the skill of a deep-sea diver is very different from that of a lane swimmer.

Commitments

It is common for individual contributors to evaluate and estimate the time taken for a delivery based on their own capability and past experiences with the delivery process. While taking on a new project or deliverable, often new managers tend to evaluate and estimate just the way they used to, that is, based on their own abilities. A manager needs to understand his team and other factors like the experience available in the team, the time to be invested in learning and ramp up, and many more.

New managers are also quick to commit an aggressive date, since they would like to have the satisfaction of a completed deliverable, sooner rather than later.

It is also tough for a new manager to say NO to more work. More work than what can be handled, given the circumstances.

Information sharing

Information is, perhaps, the most valuable asset in today's environment. The conduit visualization applies well, when analyzing information sharing.

As an individual contributor, the information you really need is usually technical or directly deliverable-related such as a time line or expected quality. As a manager you tend to get a lot more.

You may receive information about the deliverables, about other dependent deliverables, about what is happening in the environment, future plans, about people, and about policies. As a conduit, you have the necessary context and a better understanding of the two sides. Basic information at one end may be critical data points on the other side.

As a manager you need to figure out how to manage this information.

Treatment #1: Some of this information needs to be shared as is no change required.

Treatment #2: Some needs to be changed to make it fit the context and reduce complexity of details.

Treatment #3: Some just needs to be kept with you.

Treatment #3 is really the one to watch out for, as it's hard to keep information from your trusted team or peer or a friend. Dishing out details that others don't know also illustrates a sense of power, and being in-the-know, so it's easy to slip into a model where you routinely dish out details that are not to be talked about to that audience.

All of the previous treatments also apply to the movement of information from you to your manager/management chain. As a manager, you are supposed to report the status of deliverables as well as the general status of the team, which includes the problems being faced, achievements, and what's working versus what's not working for the team. Very often a new manager finds it difficult to make the choice between the three treatments.

Not giving up control

This is probably the hardest of things to do, and for most new managers, this conflicts with the idea of being a manager. Everyone expects to have more control as a manager; however, a key part of being a manager is to give up control to your team members. Many decisions that you used to take as an individual contributor may now be left to folks who are more in the thick of things.

In order to increase the scope of your knowledge and influence, you may have to give up on the depth of involvement. The folks who take up the work from you, in those areas, are the right people to take those decisions and should be allowed to do so.

Another key aspect to understand is that, in most cases, there are no right or wrong decisions. For example, a software design can be done in many, many ways, and each design will have its own merits and demerits. Similarly, how a customer's problem can be supported may have many solutions. A manager is better off when he has a reputation and influence in the team so that team members come to him whenever there is a critical-enough decision.

Many new managers tend to keep all the decision making to themselves, creating a level of distrust and slowing down all the processes.

Enforcing your will

One of the subtle aspects of being a manager is to enforce your will. People in the knowledge industry are well educated, perhaps very analytical, and there's a lot of scope for different viewpoints and discussions. This can sometimes lead to too much discussion and not enough execution.

Once again, there are many ways of doing things and everything can be debated. At times, managers are compelled to make decisions by consensus, which isn't always easy to come by.

Managers need the ability to arrive at a decision, while taking many viewpoints, but it'll be rare to get a 100 percent consensus.

Once a decision is made, a manager would need to endorse it and stand by it. Everyone else who may need to follow or support the decision should have no confusion regarding following the decision. A manager must be able to enforce his will when required.

The other end of the spectrum also exists, that is, a manager always enforcing his will regardless of others' opinions. Being a manager doesn't really mean that you are technically best or always right. The team members are equally bright and should be able to influence decisions that impact them.

Always enforcing your will may lead to alienation and distancing between the manager and his team.

This aspect always goes with the feel of things. Too much or too little can create trouble.

Defensive approach — being afraid to goof up

Every new role and responsibility brings about its own challenges. Your response to these challenges makes you unique and contributes to your successes. It is also true that it's usual human behavior to be cautious when in a new situation. Being cautious is different from being defensive. A defensive mindset may lead to inaction, which leads to inefficiency and loss of productivity.

Some of the ways this manifests are as follows:

Since managers are leaders, they are also responsible for setting an example for their team. Sometimes new managers take this too far and run a risk of becoming uptight:

A defensive mindset can easily seep down into the organization and is not typical of successful teams.