

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

What was the most surprising thing to you about becoming a manager? What was the hardest thing you had to learn? What helped?
======
bdfh42
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.

~~~
jnazario
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...](http://hbr.org/product/harvard-managementor-management-essentials-
package/an/7103BN-BUN-ENG)

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.

~~~
RougeFemme
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.

~~~
jnazario
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."

------
blooberr
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/](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.

