Should you be a manager?

One of the most common questions I hear around management is folks asking whether management is right for them. This is particularly common for people who are already demonstrating leadership within their role -- and want to start planning for what should come next.

As with most things, the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. There are some natural traits that can indicate you'd be successful and fulfilled by stepping into a management role, and some traits that would make success very difficult. Then there's a whole set of traits that might help or hinder your path to management.

Promising management traits

People who demonstrate most or all of these traits tend to be naturally strong managers; these skills can (and should) also be cultivated if you're looking to move towards management.

You have a growth mindset. Stepping into management requires learning a whole new set of skills (and making a whole new set of mistakes). Every manager makes mistakes, and they make a whole lot of them when they're first transitioning into the role. Being able to learn from those mistakes is key to getting to strong management.

You listen. I cannot emphasize how overlooked the listening part of management (and life) is (and you will see me continue to emphasize it). Most of management boils down to listening and doing something about what you've heard; people who already excel at listening have a natural head start in the skills that make for strong management.

You celebrate your peers' and team's wins. As a manager, the way you achieve success is through the success of the members of your team (and the team as a whole) -- but you don't get to claim credit for it. The people who naturally take pride in the achievements not as an individual but as part of a larger whole tend to have an easier time being able to reframe their success as the reflection of their team's successes.

You think in systems. Many-to-most of the challenges you'll face as a manager are not one-off scenarios, but patterns of problems that get perpetuated by a lot of different factors. Recognizing these factors and adjusting the ways you and your team work make for much more effective problem solving than individual interventions.¹

Signs management may not be for you

I'd call these the warning signs of weak management; you can take steps to address them, but if you don't, you probably won't be a successful manager.

You don't like working with people. If you prefer to work alone, management probably isn't the right path. You don't have to be an extrovert to be a manager (and I'd argue that a lot of the traits that make strong managers are more common in introverts), but your day-to-day will be a lot of talking and partnering with individuals on your team and across the organization.² If that sounds like a miserable way to spend your day, management is probably not the right growth path for you.

You often find yourself cleaning up other people's messes. It's not the action but the sentiment behind this statement that makes it a signal that management may not be your best path. As a manager, every mess is your mess, no matter what factors combined to introduce it. If you come at problems with a blame-mindset, you'll have a hard time building trust with your team members and your peers -- and end up with a whole lot more messes to clean up because of it.

You're in it for the money. If money is the only reason you want to step into a management position, it's probably not the right move. There's nothing wrong with using compensation as one of the factors that interests you in management, but a primary focus on money can lower your empathy and prevent you from supporting your team.

Ambivalent signals ( ¯(ツ)/¯ )

And then there's the traits that could make you an excellent manager, or could make you dread management. Most of these require conscious attention to strengthen your skills as a manager, but unlike the warning signs above, don't require fundamental shifts to address.

You already love what you do every day. If the tasks that make up your day-to-day bring you a lot of joy, you may find the day-to-day of management much more frustrating. But, you may also find that you love the day-to-day of management just as much. It's hard to know which way you'll fall until you actually take on the responsibilities; in my experience, management work tends to be a lot of wildly different tasks that require a lot of communication, as opposed to the focused and predictable work I had as an engineer. Every day looks different as a manager.

You want to expand your own influence. Ambition isn't a bad trait in a manager, but it is one that deserves a lot of conscious thought. A lot of the horror-stories around management come out of people who let their ambition get ahead of the needs of their teams. If you're looking towards management as a way to be able to grow farther in the organization, make sure it does not come at the expense of your peers or your team.

You're very empathetic or very blunt. Both empathy and candor are key traits that managers need to demonstrate to be able to support their teams; the trick is to balance each approach to give feedback and support. Kim Scott references the extremes of this spectrum as "Ruinous Empathy" and "Obnoxious Aggression" in her 2017 book Radical Candor, and if you naturally fall on one side of the spectrum, you may find it challenging to balance it out with the opposite set of skills. I've found that it's easier for highly-empathetic managers to develop candid feedback skills than the reverse, largely because the team extends more trust to managers that demonstrate empathy.

You're either excellent or not-so-great at the role you'd be managing. If you're an expert in your role, stepping into a management role may be an exercise in frustration as your team is not able to meet the bar you know is possible. If you're not an expert, it may be harder for the team to trust that your direction is worth following. In either case, there are strategies you can take to balance yourself out to be a strong manager for your team (e.g. experts can build up their delegation skills, non-experts can build up their listening skills).

Avoiding the Peter Principle

(If you're not familiar, the Peter Principle suggests that talented individuals continue to be promoted until they are no longer able to meet the expectations of their new role)

A lot of organizations still present management as the only way to grow, so it can sometimes feel like you have to become a manager to prevent your career from stagnating, even if you'd be miserable doing so.

This is worth a whole article on its own³, but if you're in this situation, the steps I recommend are:

• Talk to your manager to see if there are ways to continue growing without becoming a manager. Some common ways this can happen are stepping into a mentorship role, transferring teams, or pursuing certifications and accreditations. Compensation may or may not be affected by these changes, so it's worth bringing explicitly into the conversation.
• Start keeping a "hype doc" for yourself, tracking all of the things you've accomplished and skills you've learned.⁴ This can help you see all the ways you have grown, and what areas you want to continue focusing on.
• Look for organizations that offer growth outside of the management track, and use your hype doc to update your resume to reflect the type of work you want to focus on.

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As a manager, one of my primary measures of success is whether my direct reports are in positions that play to their strengths -- and a lot of the time, it isn't a management role. A good manager should be ensuring that even if you aren't in a formal management position, you are still celebrated and respected for the leadership you show in whatever role suits you best. And if you feel like management is a path you want to explore, but end up finding it's not for you, the skills you pick up along the way also help you advocate for your team and your users, giving you new ways to grow.

Footnotes

1. I was introduced to Systems Thinking via the work of Donella Meadows, and highly recommend exploring her writings. ↩

2. There's good reason that managers are stereotyped as being in meetings all day -- because you usually are in meetings all day. Ideally, they're also productive meetings, but that doesn't always end up being the case. ↩

3. I addressed some of these areas in my article on the difference between management and leadership. ↩

4. I was introduced to this concept by my former coworker & fellow entrepreneur, Kyla Brown. Can't recommend her enough! ↩