Congratulations, you're getting promoted! You have excelled at the
Thing You Do to such a degree that you'll now be leading a whole
team of people who Do That Thing. Very responsibility, much excite.
Okay wait, you may say. That's cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I'm
pretty good at it, and if I'm leading a team, will I still get to do
it? Will I still get to perform the work that got me to where I am
today?
The short answer is: Yes, you can! If it's important to you to keep
doing some "individual contributor" work as a manager, you can make
that happen.
The long answer is: Well, you can. Like, if Mark Zuckerberg wants to
go in and make some code changes to Facebook, he has the authority
necessary to do that. And reportedly, in frustration with a pet bug
or issue, Zuck has been known to bang out a fix and submit a merge
request - which then hits a series of roadblocks around coding
guidelines, localization, automated testing, and oh god why is this
stuff so complicated these days ughhhhh.
And that's good. It's helpful for leaders to get their hands dirty
from time to time, to get caught up on what their teams are doing,
how they're doing it, and get more context for the detail work
involved.
But let's be honest. Is Mark Zuckerberg's time best spent mastering
Facebook's latest pull request rules around internationalization
flow, or would that same time be better spent, I don't know,
figuring out how Facebook can ruin the world less?
As a manager, you too need to consider these tradeoffs. Yes, you
have the ability to dig in and do the work yourself, but you now
have a specialer ability: you can multiply your efforts across a
whole group. As a leader, you're in a position to solve bigger
problems than you ever could by yourself, since you can deploy the
full force of a team.
[1]Leadership Mode Activate - Allen Pike
I could do without the Zuck reference, but the message is sound. This
was something I struggled with when I became the manager of not just a
team but a large team of people with arguably better skills than mine.
Securing budget, running interference, talking with customers, and
playing politics (albeit poorly) were more valuable than me changing
firewall rules or adding a static route or running down anomalous
traffic patterns.
Oh, I could also do without the giant robot analogy.
Still a good article.
Also on:
[2]Twitter
__________________________________________________________________
My original entry is here: [3]Leadership Mode Activate. It posted Wed,
12 Dec 2018 14:50:15 +0000.
Filed under: business,
References
1.
https://www.allenpike.com/2018/leadership-mode-mech
2.
https://twitter.com/prjorgensen/status/1072867245833875456
3.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2417
