Hey folks, welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This week's edition is about the first time you manage people.
You have probably had a manager who was the bottleneck for some work because every decision waited on them.
Your work sat in their inbox for days and the whole team moved at the speed of one very busy person, and you remember how frustrating it was.
The first time I managed people, I became that person and I had no idea it was happening.
I had been promoted because I was good at the work, so I assumed managing was basically my old job with a few people attached.
For the first few weeks I kept taking the hardest, most interesting tasks for myself, because I was quick at them and I liked them.
When someone gave me something that was not quite right, I would just fix it myself at night rather than explain how to fix it.
I was working harder than I ever had, and I told myself this was what being in charge felt like.
Then one evening I noticed three people sitting idle, all of them waiting on me to clear something before they could move.
That was the moment I realised I was the reason the team was slow and nobody was learning anything, because I had hoarded all the parts worth learning from.
There is a reason this is so common.
We get promoted for the exact skill we then have to stop using.
This is what I want to write about this week.
The jump from doing the work to managing the work is the one nobody prepares you for because in most cases they change your title on a Friday and hand you a different job on Monday, and somehow expect you to know it is different.
So here is what I wish someone had told me.
You got promoted for being good at the work, so every instinct tells you to keep doing the work but that’s counterproductive.
What you produce on your own stops counting because you’re being judged on what the team produces because of you.
This is harder than it sounds, because plenty of your good days will look empty from the outside.
You spend the day answering questions and unblocking people and helping someone think through something hard, and you go home feeling like you got nothing done.
But you did because the team moved because of you.
One habit that helped me here is that when someone brings you a problem, do not lead with the answer, even when you have it.
Ask them what they would do because most of the time they already have a reasonable instinct and just want a little permission to act on it.
Talk them through their own thinking so that slowly they stop needing you for it.
The day your title changes, the weight of everything you say changes with it.
You do not feel any different inside, which is exactly why this one catches you out.
A few weeks ago I was going through a draft with two of my juniors and said something like, this is not really working, let us start again.
To me it was an offhand line but the two of them spent their entire weekend rebuilding it, and came in on Monday watching my face while I read it.
The same sentence from a peer is just an opinion while from a manager it’s a verdict.
A passing bit of criticism from you can sit on someone for days, while the praise is absorbed by lunch.
You cannot feel any of this from your side, because you are still the same person saying the same things you always said, so you have to assume your words land harder than you mean them to, and pick them with a bit more care than feels necessary.
This one took me much longer to learn.
When you first manage people, you manage them the way you would want to be managed. I like being left alone.
Give me the goal and the deadline and let me get on with it.
So that is what I handed everyone, a lot of room and not much checking in.
It worked beautifully for one person but didn’t for others. Some wanted more check-ins and clearer feedback than I was giving, and they read all that space as me not caring.
Gallup has found that 67% of employees whose managers focus on their strengths are engaged, against 31% when the manager fixates on weaknesses, and the only way to know which strengths someone has is to ask.
People usually just tell you, and then it is on you to adjust, because you are not managing copies of yourself.
This one feels wrong to say out loud, especially here, where working the latest is treated like a badge.
We have had public arguments about 70-hour and 90-hour weeks, and India already has more than half its workforce putting in 49 hours or more.
As a strong performer, you are used to signalling effort such as being the last one online.
It got you noticed, and it probably got you this promotion, so you carry it into managing, and you keep being the one visibly working the hardest.
The problem is that your team now reads you as the standard.
If you are replying to messages at 1am, the message they receive is that this is what is expected here.
It wears people down, because the quiet, conscientious ones will start matching your hours, and they will burn out long before they tell you.
You think you are leading from the front but what you are doing is setting a pace nobody can sustain.
The harder, better thing is to protect their hours, not just your own.
A team that is rested does better work for longer than a team competing on exhaustion.
Here is the test I use on myself now.
Picture being away for two weeks with your phone switched off.
Does the work stop?
If it keeps moving without you, you have built the thing you were promoted to build.
If it grinds to a halt, you are probably still the bottleneck, the way I was in that first month.
Hit reply: what was the biggest mistake you made in your first few weeks as a manager?
I read every email.
Swati