Four things a new manager should practice

One of the hard parts about management is that many folks end up there by accident. Very often, folks are told “you’re a high performing individual contributor, so you will clearly have an easy time becoming a manager of other individual contributors.” While it’s true that many of the best managers are fantastic individual contributors, the process of becoming a great manager is often fraught with trial and error for many folks.

I’ve done the transition from IC to manager (in both directions) at nearly every software job I’ve had, and this guide is an attempt to lay out some of the things that I wish I knew when I was doing it for the first time. The craft of management (and management is a craft, just like programming) is vast and you could spend your whole life learning and improving at it, but I believe these four practices will be the best bang for the buck in terms of setting new managers up for success.

TLDR:

The most important thing is setting expectations.
Don’t wait until performance reviews to give feedback.
The truth is almost always better than what you think someone wants to hear.
Don’t make too many promises, keep the ones that you do.

Set expectations early and clearly#

I think the most common thing that trips new managers up is a failure to correctly set expectations. I don’t mean this in a colloquial kind of “there’s a new sheriff in town” kind of way - literally, a critical factor in your directs’ ability to succeed and feel good about their work will be how well they understand what is expected of them in their role. As the primary agent through which your directs interact with their employer, that means you’re responsible for ensuring this.

As you’re stepping into a new role, you should be thinking about the role of each of your direct reports and thinking about what your expectations are for them - the type of work they’re doing, how they’re doing it, etc. You might expect a more senior engineer to be an active participant in the planning process or to be working with the more junior folks on coaching and mentorship, and you might expect someone who’s newer in their role to be proactive in seeking feedback or guidance. Write all of this down and in an early 1:1 with your directs, talk it through with them.

Your company’s engineering ladder (if it exists) is a great resource to draw on, because you want to avoid situations when an employee’s manager expects things from them that are far removed from what the company as a whole expects from them. In the most basic terms, if your expectations are very different from what the organization requires for a promotion that’s likely to result in stress and confusion.

The manager/direct report relationship very frequently breaks down when there isn’t clarity on what’s expected of a person in their role. People can become discouraged or stressed when they aren’t sure how to tell if they’re meeting expectations or doing a good job and this can lead to fear, stress, and a lack of confidence. In contrast, when people have a clear understanding of what their manager’s expectations are and how well they’re doing at work they’ll find it much easier to demonstrate autonomy and ownership in their work.

This is, in my opinion, one of the most important things a manager can do and even experienced managers can sometimes neglect this practice. It sounds simple on paper, but I’d encourage you to think back to how many times you might have felt unsure of what your manager expects of you and how that made you feel.

Don’t surprise folks#

One of the most important things you can do as a new manager is to build a habit of providing feedback early and often to folks. As someone’s peer or teammate, it can often feel intimidating or overbearing to provide unsolicited feedback - but as a manager, it’s critical.

You should be meeting with your new direct reports on a weekly basis for at least 30 minutes, and it’s important to build a habit early on of providing some kind of feedback to your directs each week. You need to be close enough to the work that your team is doing to be able to provide real, tangible feedback. The trap that managers (even managers who’ve been doing it for years) fall into is to save the feedback until the performance reviews are written, whereupon people are reading through a bunch of comments that they’ve never heard before and have no idea how to respond.

Giving feedback in smaller, more frequent bites makes it easier for people to respond and react. These are your opportunities for helping to guide folks onto the right path before issues grow too large, but they’re also a critical tool for encouragement - “avoid doing this” and “it was really good when you did that” are both powerful tools for performance management. If you’re doing a good job of this, every quarterly or annual performance review you write should be basically a formality: you should strive for frequent enough feedback that there is nothing you could put into a performance review that would surprise the person who’s reading it.

If this isn’t a habit you already have from coaching your peers, you’ll want to learn how to give good feedback. The best source I’ve personally found for that is the great book Thanks for the Feedback. I highly recommend reading this one to learn how to give constructive feedback, and how to also make giving constructive criticism less of a scary proposition.

Tell the truth#

When you’re thrust into a new management role with folks looking to you for answers, there’s a temptation to try and hide how little you might actually know: the sad reality is that your manager is certainly privy to information you don’t have, but not all-knowing. You will be asked lots of questions that you do not have the answers to, and your job in those scenarios is to admit to it!

When one of your directs asks you a question that you don’t have the answer to, don’t make something up or speculate too much - this is especially important for performance questions. Trying to essentially guess the answer to the question “why didn’t I get promoted this cycle” can be harmful to your relationship with that person, and doubly so if you find yourself telling them what you think will make them feel better regardless of how true it is.

As a software engineer you likely get asked multiple times a week how to do something you don’t already know how to do, and your success in that role has probably been the result of a willingness to say “I don’t have the answer, but I can figure it out.” You should take this same approach with your directs - admit that you don’t have the answers or information, but make a commitment to find the answers. In the promotion example, it’s generally healthier to say that you don’t have the exact reasons why they might have been passed over for a promotion but that you can find out - and then actually go do that so you can let them know.

The flip side to this is that maybe you actually do know why they were passed over for promotion. Whenever you can do so (and as a manager, you will ultimately be privy to information that you can’t share with the team), being honest is the best policy. Put yourself in their shoes - as a high performer who’s really working hard toward a promotion, would you rather hear that a promotion “just wasn’t in the budget this year”, or would you prefer to know that there were specific skills that you ought to be working on?

Keep the promises that you make#

The temptation to be a people-pleaser looms large for most folks in software engineering management roles, and a trap that many new managers fall into is either making too many promises they can’t possibly keep or not following through on the promises that they make.

Don’t make promises unless you’re positive that you can keep them. When it comes to promotions, raises, team reassignments, and similar things that are not 100% within your power to control you shouldn’t ever give the opposite impression.

You absolutely should be proactive on working with your directs on their promotion packets or making the case for a bump in their compensation. But in that 1:1 when your direct tells you how important it is to them to get that new job title, it can be all to easy to want to make them happy and give the impression that it’s a sure thing and will definitely happen (or worse, will definitely happen if they do X, Y, and Z this quarter). Instead, it’s better to explain how the process works and how the two of you will work together to make that case so that the likelihood of it happening is high.

On the flip side, when you do make promises as a manager it’s incredibly important to your directs that you keep them. In general, I don’t even mean promising that someone is going to get a raise or a promotion - every time you tell your directs in a 1:1 that you’ll look into something or follow up with them about a thing you were talking about, that is a promise! These can seem like such small things that nobody will really care if you don’t follow through, but the effect compounds over time - if you make a habit of not following through on even the small things, you might be surprised months later to find out that your directs don’t trust you.

Some other useful tidbits and resources#

The three points above (in my experience) will get you pretty dang far towards building a solid and effective managerial foundation. Here are a few other resources and small notes:

Books#

There are a ton of management books in general out there and for a while I was reading as many as I could get my hands on. Fortunately, the list of books I found to be actually valuable is pretty short (non-affiliate links below):

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. I initially thought I would hate this book given all the rah-rah military machismo, but it turned out to be a succinct and useful introduction to what it means to be accountable as a leader without being a micromanager. I read it as part of my first management role and it influences how I think about leading to this day.
First Break All The Rules. This book is the result of Gallup research into “the world’s best managers.” A lot the findings here will likely surprise you if you’re new to management, but if all you take away from this is the importance of making sure your directs know what you expect of them it’ll be worth it.
Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet. In the long-term, a great leader is continutally cultivating new leaders out of their team - managers who fail to do this are the ones who end up overwhelmed with work and with teams that resent them. This is a great resource on how to achieve that “empowerment” that the MBAs are always talking about.
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. You are going to be having a lot of difficult conversations as a manager - this book will help you navigate those. Crucial Conversations is another book that lots of folks rightly recommend, but I personally found Nonviolent Communication to be the more useful resource. You probably can’t go wrong with either one.
Radical Candor. I’m going to suggest that you leave this one for last - the material in here is really important (and indeed, has probably influenced my everyday work life more than the other books) but way too many people will skim this book and use “being radically candid” as an excuse to be an asshole. Make sure that you either read the whole thing or skip it.

Other tidbits#

If you don’t have a personal organization system of some kind, you’re going to want to develop one. As a manager, your time is going to naturally start to become more fragmented and interrupt-driven and you’re going to need a way to keep track of the legions of little things that you need to pay attention to. I use GTD - do not underestimate the power of keeping a to-do list up to date.
I typically schedule 1:1s for 30 minutes weekly at a minimum. Having a good 1:1 is a long topic, but some short rules: don’t use 1:1s for status updates, let your directs drive the agenda, and try to listen more than you talk (great tool for this: when someone asks you a question about how to proceed in some situation, ask them what they think before you answer).
Don’t ever cancel a 1:1 if you can help it. Your 1:1s with your directs will become an important part of the relationship they have with you and their work - treat them as important. It sends a bad message to your team if their 1:1s are frequently canceled or rescheduled because “you’re too busy”.
Build a network of other managers and talk to them a lot. Your peer managers will be who you’re working with a lot to get things done, but they’re also going to generally be one of the only places you can kind of vent and let off steam about all the ways in which being a manager is hard.

Closing thoughts#

Management is tough, and most industries need more people who actually want to be a manager. It’s an important thing to be able to admit to yourself that management isn’t for you, or that maybe this isn’t the right time for you to become a manager - I’ve done this myself many times. Becoming a manager is no longer the only way to continue advancing your career at most companies, and you will do better by yourself and your team not to force yourself to stick around in a role that you hate.

Whether you decide to stick around in management or not, I hope that these tips can make that experience fulfilling and less scary for you.

Good luck!