5 Weird Things New Managers Wish They Were Warned About
A promotion to a manager position is a bit like becoming a parent. Some surprising realities are left untold by the people that came before you, and it is up to you to discover them on your own.
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Over 17 years of managerial experience, I had numerous weird feelings that I didn’t even realize I was going through. No one told me about them beforehand, which made them harder to spot, let alone become comfortable with them.
Here is a selection of five the weirdest things I didn’t see coming as a manager:
You feel useless. The wider your scope of responsibilities is, the more some of your decisions have a massive impact. No one tells you which decisions are critical and which ones are unimportant. Worse, for some of the most important decisions you have to make, it is up to you to figure out that a decision needs to be made in the first place. That is why a big chunk of your time should be spent on gathering hard and soft signals in order to spot and inform those decisions. Reading and listening to what others people are saying will make you feel totally passive and useless. “What did you do today? I read three memos and attended eight meetings.”. Ugh. What can you do about it? Keep at it. Stay focused, continue to pay attention. Regularly, a situation will come where all the information you have gathered will allow you to see a problem that everyone is ignoring, and to take the action that is required. This moment will make it up for the rest.
You are surrounded by walking contradictions. “I want a training, but I have no idea on what”, “I want to be involved earlier, but I don’t want to deal with contradicting information”, “I think the strategy is crap, but I don’t have suggestions on how to make it better”, “I want more autonomy, but I don’t want to be held accountable for the impact of my decisions”. Being a manager exposes you to all sorts of human contradictions. Finding ways to frame them as interesting paradoxes to solve is critical for you to not become cynical.
Your impact is invisible. Many things you should be doing require you to be a step ahead of what is about to happen. Promote the person before she’s craving for it, give the raise before she comes to you with a job offer from a competitor, assign her to a a different role before she’s bored. Change the project cadence before the team hits a wall. Raise the bar higher for a milestone before the team feels ready for it. (The alternative is to let things burn, then intervene as the fireman-savior. It’s very rewarding for the ego. Try to avoid it.) If you do those things well, no one will notice them. Their impact will be the absence of problems, which triggers very little attention. Frustrating, right? Here’s the interesting part about it: deeply feeling unrewarded can help you pay attention to the colleagues around you who are also doing invisible work. Thank them. Tell them that you are seeing the efforts they put in.
You shout all the time. Well, in fact, you are speaking normally, but the perception of others has changed. This takes time to get used to — having a conversation, and discovering later that your casual perspective was interpreted as a direct order. Once you have become a manager, your voice carries more weight than you think, and sometimes way more than you want. Over time, to compensate for that phenomenon, great managers develop the habit of speaking less, speaking last, and most importantly, not speaking at all.
Your team is not your team. As a manager, the team you are in charge of is not the team you feel part of. The people you manage may feel part of your team — you won’t. Your sense of belonging is with your peers, with the people managed by the same manager as you. There is nothing you can do about that. Accept the situation.
Am I alone here? Did you go through similar weird moments at work you wish someone told you about beforehand?