I’ve worked with a good number of people managers and career changers over the last decade, and one of the dilemmas I often see people grappling with is whether or not to go for a management role (or to step away from one).
There’s such a difference between serving in a supervisory role and an individual role. When you’re in an individual role, you are responsible for your own results. You might be contributing to a team effort (which is even better), but you are primarily responsible for your own contribution to that team. In a management role, you have to get most of your results through other people. (I’m including those roles where you might not have direct reports, but you are still responsible for enrolling others and influencing them to get results.)
One of my clients was in a tough spot with this decision. She had a job she loved, working on a team and with a manager she loved. She’d never had a good manager before. And yet, folks higher up the hierarchical ladder were asking her to make the change because she embodied the culture they were trying to create. Did she dare step out of this hard-won sure thing into an unknown future? What if she hated being a manager? To date she’d had only one positive role model for management. She certainly didn’t want to be like her old managers.
You don’t want to be a victim of the Peter Principle, which says that people are promoted based on their tenure or their success in a previous role, irrespective of their capacity to excel in the new position.
How do you decide like this when so much is at stake? No matter what you choose, you have lost what might have been your dream job in the other direction.
There is nothing inherently better about being a people manager or an individual contributor. Just because you have people reporting to you does not mean you’re further along in your career, deserve more respect, or have more influence. Remember: There are managers at fast food restaurants with 3 years of work experience, and advisors to highly-paid executives who couldn’t get there without 4 decades of responsibility under their belts.
I’ve put together a list of the questions I think you should be asking yourself if you are considering a move to (or away from) people-management, if this is something that you’re facing:
Am I willing to prioritize their needs?
One of the management challenges I hear about a lot is the frustration that comes when instructions are given but the employee goes off on his/her own and does the wrong thing. And yet, when they take the time to make sure they’re clear, they hear complaints that they’ve been micromanaging. This is understandably frustrating! But the real question here is not about whether you can be clear, but Am I willing to partner with others to co-create our working relationship?
Making assignments or changing procedures is only partly about delivering information. It’s also about listening, asking questions to find out what people need and what they are hearing. The most successful people managers are those who see themselves as the butler, not the prince.
If you can make it your mission to ensure that others’ needs are met — whether needs for supplies, understanding, direction, or support — then you should seriously consider making the move to a management role.
Am I willing to learn how to manage myself? Am I willing to be compassionate toward others when they fail?
Failure at work comes in all types. Technology is frequently difficult to understand. Time gets away from us. Targets are missed. Misunderstandings happen. These failures can cause anything from frustration to outright shame, and we just aren’t at our best when we feel ashamed. If you are counting on someone else’s results but they fail, can you avoid making that shame worse?
Because failures cause frustration and shame, they also reduce our problem-solving abilities. Fight-or-flight mode gets triggered, and that means our brains start over-simplifying to conserve and redirect energy. It takes a great deal of self-management to keep listening and thinking enough to find out what really went wrong and what the actual problem is that you need to solve.
Am I willing to learn how to see the differences in gifts between different people and redistribute some responsibilities based on those gifts?
We are all differently abled, and we all have differently-ordered values. The gifts and skills and strengths that feel obvious and easy to you can be difficult or might not even be on the radar of the people you manage. What’s more, they may have gifts, skills, and strengths that you don’t automatically see or understand.
However, if you are willing to cultivate curiosity about how people who are different from you might be great just as they are (while continuing to hold the assurance that you are great just as you are), what could you see in them? What possibilities might open up? There is so much more to people management than deciding whether the right people are on the bus.
(And, unfortunately, sometimes you might be driving the wrong bus for that person. If there’s no way for you to take advantage of their gifts, are you willing to help them find the right bus?
Am I willing to learn how to manage my resources, including time, money, and attention effectively?
It’s true — managers are responsible for a very wide array of duties, ranging from the inspirational to the tedious. Unless organization and discernment happen to be your two primary strengths, accepting a promotion to manager probably means you’ll come to feel overwhelmed. Some responsibilities will be so frustrating that you’ll rail against the fact that you must do them at all, and some might feel intimidating or even impossible.
Becoming a manager might mean saying goodbye to that feeling of finishing your work by the end of the day. It might mean agreeing to feel a little nervous about whether you’re doing well enough, all the time. It takes courage as well as those organizational and discernment skills to be in a role that is visible, stuck in the middle, and tends to be a catch-all for tasks that nobody else is responsible for. To survive and thrive, you’ll need to learn how to direct your attention
Ultimately, to make this decision you will need to assess your own capacity and willingness to develop a new set of skills. Certainly, many of these skills will be useful even for individual contributors, but I find them critical for people managers.
If you face a choice of this magnitude, it is a true gift! It means that you are in the enviable position of having choice. May your path become clear as you reflect on your readiness.
You can start a no-risk conversation with me if you’re interested in exploring how coaching might support you in achieving your goals. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
You might also be interested in these articles from HBR: You Don’t Need to Be “the Boss” to Be a Leader and How to (Politely) Say “No” to Being a Manager.
