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Ask HN: What was the hardest part about being a first time manager?

6 pointsjevanish10 comments

What was the most surprising thing to you about becoming a manager? What was the hardest thing you had to learn? What helped?

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There is very little available advice on starting out in management.

Start by valuing everyone who reports to you. Give them all respect - and that can be hard when someone is not performing OR you misunderstand their position and thus get the idea they are not making the right contribution.

Look for talent and encourage it. This is very hard. Too often you judge people by the job they are doing now rather than try and gauge how they might tackle the next job (this will happen to you as well).

Catch your people "doing things right" and praise them for it - way better than catching them doing the wrong thing and telling them off.

Stand by all of your team - no matter how big the foul up - take the blame up front. Sort out what went wrong afterwards.

Never be too afraid to say sorry - I messed up - it is not easy but the worst managers bluff their way through when all of their team know then blew it!

Good luck - and learn from your best people.

while i agree with much of what bdfh42 said, there's one glaring mistake above:

> There is very little available advice on starting out in management.

i disagree. there's a shitload: go to any bookstore, real or virtual, and go to the business section. TONS of stuff on being a manager. the trouble is finding USEFUL, WORTHWHILE stuff. most of it - the vast majority of it - is drivel and derivative. find the gems.

myself, when i first became a manager i studied hard, i read tons of material and haven't stopped because it's a constant learning process. i studied three major subjects: managing people, managing projects, and leadership. they're all core skills to being an effective manager. a fourth one - managing yourself - is often overlooked, but don't skimp on it. self discipline and management will help you and the people who report to you immeasurably.

management is not about command but about responsibility: to the organization, to your boss, and to your staff. bdfh42 gets much of that right in his nutshell above. communication is a core concept, learn it and continually work on it. learn to delegate, learn to train, learn to plan, learn to trust - and earn trust. learn to lead.

a lot of my leadership lessons have come from military books lately, and one lesson i learned a long time ago from that field has stayed with me: complaints go up. never let your team hear you complain. you set the tone, you keep a positive attitude about things and people even if you're grinding your teeth when you do. your example reverberates with your team, never forget that. it's part of the responsibility.

harvard business review has a press and they have tons of books on management essentials worth studying. myself, i recommend their "essentials" books. they cherry pick articles from their magazine (which is also worth subscribing to) and put them together in a book. well worth it, and you can often find them cheap and used on amazon. here's one example:

http://hbr.org/product/harvard-managementor-management-essen...

i read a ton of peter drucker - and recommend his books wholeheartedly - and here's his books i suggest:

- The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done - just because you're not (yet) an executive doesn't mean you can't learn how to manage like one. this book taught me tons, and i recommend it to nearly any and all new managers i can.

- Managing Oneself - learn how to manage yourself, your time, your projects and everything else will come naturally.

- Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - this is a tome but is the premier book of his, well worth the time you spend on it.

as for common pitfalls on being a first time manager they include failure to delegate, being too "hands on", and not setting expectations right. a lot of this is covered in "The Leadership Pipeline" by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel. while a book about big orgs building succession pipelines, for a manager it's really valuable because it teaches you what's expected of you by your superiors, and common pitfalls - and how to avoid them.

one of my favorite early books on leadership was "It's Your Ship" by D. Michael Abrashoff, a former navy captain. tons of great stuff in there that dovetails with the above well.

these are just some of the things i've read and shared with people over the years, and they've been extremely valuable. i spent my own money to read these and hours every night on my own and it has helped me become effective and grow. none of us are born knowing how to manage people, so study it like you would anything else new.

finally: ask for training. if your org has promoted you, ask for management training for yourself and the others around you. a couple of two day seminars will do wonders for your organization. the price is pretty reasonable, too.

> Stand by all of your team

too true: be a shit umbrella, not a shit funnel. when things happen, be the shield between your part of the org and the problem. follow up - with the individual(s), the team, and yourself - to see what went wrong and what you can learn. but never forget you should be a shit umbrella and shield your org from crap above.

I agree with all that you said except the lesson from the military about never complaining down - depending on how how you define "complain". For example, if you've been "given" a very agressive development schedule, my experience has been that it's fair - even appreciated by your team - that you state, succinctly and matter-of-factly, that you believe that the schedule is more agressive than is optimal and that you either 1) argued unsuccessfully against it or 2) argued with partial sucess against the original, more agressive schedule, so there is a partial win. And then comes the positivity. . ."we need to work together to figure out how to meet this schedule with minimal risk". This is what I did as a manager, when applicable, and what I appreciated as a team member listening to my manager.

And I worked for the military for a while - as a civilian - and I observed various leadership styles among the officers and various levels of receptiveness among those they were leading. They knew that they needed to salute and carry on with the job, whether they agreed with the plan or not, but they still appreciated the acknowledgement that the plan they were about to carry out was not perfect but was the best that it could be, given the constraints.

good point. that's not grousing, like i was originally thinking, but is a valid point. it expresses sympathies with your team, and in doing that you can make sure you set them up to succeed: clearing obstacles, gathering materials, resetting expectations, etc. "welcome to the suck."

Thanks for all the book tips. I curious to both of you that responded...do either of you do anything to personally connect with each team member? Do you keep track of each team member's progress and maybe some personal info (like birthday, meaningful events, etc) in any way like in an evernote or personal CRM?

take all of your direct reports to lunch periodically, individually. maybe once a quarter, once a month, etc. just talk. not about work, just about life. get to know them. when they have a kid, get them something - a bear with the baby's name on it is a good example, but something personal, too. birthday cards go a long way.

get to know them, like them, and respect them.

Did you do anything to remember these things or did that come naturally and you didn't need to record it anywhere?

oops, with the downtime my reply got lost.

if you have to write it down, go ahead. better to be thought of as someone who can't remember stuff and has to take notes than someone who is insensitive and forgets things that are important to the people around them!

Listen to your people. They know more than anyone else about the conditions under which they're trying to work. If something is sub-optimal, they'll often figure it out way faster than you will.

The hardest thing was listening. I'm still working on active listening. That meant shutting up and actually synthesizing what your direct reports are trying to tell you. I used to always complete other people's sentences and it took an honest friend to tell me that was annoying.

The best resource that's helped me for management was a class called Business Management for Electrical Engineer and Computer Scientists (http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee353/) Check it out here if you have the time. All the important business topics like strategy, accounting, pricing, marketing, managing - it's all there condensed in a quarter.

Here's what I found surprising: Management allows me to multiply my technical skills with the team's help. You'll find that you can accomplish far more with a solid team than just by yourself.

Similar to the other posters, go the extra mile for your direct reports by genuinely caring for them. In a professional manner, ALWAYS set them up to win. Never throw them a project knowing that it's a sinking ship. They'll know.

For books, another one that's helped is "How to Win Friends and Influence People." A fun one to read is "The Witch Doctors" by exposing management "gurus". You'll realize management theories change every day and everyone's scrambling to defend or find the next theory that encompasses the essence of management. I find it very similar to programming language worship. That's not entirely a bad thing since that means the field will keep evolving. That also means what works for me might not work exactly for you.

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