So you recently became a manager?
Congrats. Here’s what nobody told you.
You probably got promoted because you were good at your job, technically strong, and understood the business. So your company decided to make you a manger and have you impart all that wisdom onto others. But the thing nobody tells you until it’s too late is that the skills that made you succeed at your prior job are not the same as the ones that will make you succeed at your current one.
If you’re like me, after becoming a manager you probably approached your new role in a similar fashion to how you thought about your prior one. In my case, I overemphasized process and productivity because as a data analyst I felt like anything that wasn’t defined, documented, and measured was not real.
So when thinking about how to make my new team more successful, I heavily leaned on tangible things like meeting structure, measuring deliverables, how to better track work through tickets…you know, boring shit. I really believed that if I can baseline some number of productivity like “working X tickets” and growing that number by some arbitrary percentage, I could call that success.
But here’s the secret I soon found out. Nobody cares about that stuff. All the administrative stuff is just a means to an end. What people actually want from you is to be a leader. Yes, that one vague quality that you thought meant all the things you were doing, but were actually not.
So what’s the difference between managing and leading? There are many good definitions out there but it boils down to the following three qualities:
- Mindset
- Influencing others
- Articulating a vision
1. Mindset
Because work is always in a state of flux and inherently chaotic, managers are constantly put in situations where some person needs one thing, another person is asking for something else and some deadline is inevitably approaching. Most people find these situations unpleasant and are subconsciously driven by the desire to feel a temporary relief through resolving these unresolved issues.
The problem with this mindset is that while completing tasks feels good it doesn’t guarantee that the actions being taken are the most beneficial to the overall company strategy.
Leaders differ from managers by being more resilient to uncertainty. As Abraham Zaleznik points out in his seminal article on leadership, “leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure in order to understand the issues more fully [source]”. This allows leaders to consider a wider range of solutions prior to locking into a particular decision. Often times, the decision that is made with a leader involved will come slower but leads to an overall greater alignment across teams and a more useful solution in the long-term.
2. Influencing others
By default, managers are handed some level of influence through an official organizational chart that mandates them to direct subordinates on what to work on. However, most managers that fail to become leaders will limit their influence to their subordinates and fail to elevate their team’s importance to the company.
Leaders on the other hand have a more horizontal approach. They understand that outstanding results don’t just happen through top-down orders by executives that cascade down the organization hierarchy. Instead of focusing solely on their throughput, leaders spend time networking across the organization and building relationships with a diverse set of stakeholders. Leaders understand that building relationships and showing empathy to others are important long-term investments that help set-up more ambitious collaborations.
In his article on the topic Zaleznik summarizes this idea well when writing:
Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. The distinction is simply between a manager’s attention to how things get done and a leader’s to what the events and decisions mean to participants.
So while managers often measure success by how proficiently their team delivered on requests that have already been defined, managers are often missing in the more abstract conversations that are needed to define problems and solutions. Leaders on the other hand are able to shape those conversations through their influence and position their team to play leading roles in the company’s future strategy.
3. Articulating a vision
Vision — everyone has heard this term but how many of us have dismissed it as some grandiose quality that executives fawn over in eye-rolling speeches?
I’ve been there — thinking that while vision is great, it’s no substitute for good ol’ fashioned hard work and technical know-how. But in managing others, I’ve quickly learned that technical-know how can only get you so far.
Having a vision truly IS important in getting people to see the purpose of their work, without which you cannot acheive truly superlative results.
But what is vision exactly? In a way, vision is a convincing fictional story. It is a narrative about what can be and why it is worth pursuing. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains that:
The truly unique trait of Sapiens is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities.
It’s this story-telling quality that allows leaders to rally groups of people around the same cause.
However, beyond great story-telling leaders also have to have two other traits to turn their visions into reality. The first trait is being able to see both the micro and macro factors. Leaders need to be able to not lose sight of the big picture (macro) strategy as well as chunking down that strategy into the tactical solutions (micro) that form the building blocks of the overall strategy. Without the tactical competence, you’re just a bullshitter. The seconds trait is persistence. Any ambitious strategy will encounter roadblocks and hardships. Most people will quit at this point but leaders will stay the course and carry the burden of uncertainty while continuing to project confidence and motivation to others.
Conclusion
Transitioning from being a technical expert to a people leader is not easy because the set of skills that will help you succeed in your current role are starkly different than the ones that made you successful in your prior role. New managers make the common mistake of over-relying on process, formality and project management while not bringing into awareness the more nuanced skills needed to thrive in a leadership role.
If you want to be a successful leader, you will need to adopt a leadership mindset, learn to set a vision and be able to motivate and influence others. These skills don’t develop overnight and will take practice but the first step is to open your awareness to why they are critical and why being a subject matter expert is not enough if you want to thrive as a people leader.