#177 - Positioning Yourself For a First Manager or Lead Role

Manager, Ph.D. is a newsletter and community which helps people from the world of research reach their full potential managing teams and enacting changes. We’ve already developed the advanced skills to be exceptional managers; we just need help with the basics.

If you’re new to the community, drop me a note!  Some past issues from the archive which you might be interested in include:

• #57, “Performance Communication is Expectation Communication”

• #111, “The Complete Intern Checklist"

• #130, “Taking On A New Responsibility”

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Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were restful and recharging.

I didn’t post much towards the end of 2024, but have time to be more active this year - so welcome back to Manager, PhD!

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The move to the new provider (beehiv) isn’t quite complete yet; some content hasn’t moved over, there’s a few broken links, and I have some theme tweaking to do. If you see anything that looks off, please let me know!

A question I received recently from a reader (please, do feel free to email me with any questions or thoughts or comments!) was about how to translate one’s existing experience into a compelling case as a manager role, either in the short term or over somewhat longer times. It’s a question that comes up a lot, and many readers are thinking about their first manager or team lead role. So I’m sharing part of my answer here.

Should I be seeing myself as a manager?

When people are looking to hire front-line managers, in addition to the usual table-stakes individual contributor skills (honours commitments, gets things done, is fairly pleasant to work with, understands their strengths and mitigates their weaknesses), they’re broadly looking for people who have demonstrated these kinds of behaviours:

• Ensure that the individuals in the team grow and develop

  • Understand and support individual career development of team members

  • Provide calibrated growth opportunities, mentorship, and sponsorship

  • Provide routine performance feedback, positive and negative

  • Manage out people who aren’t contributing to (or worse, who are harming) the team

• Ensure the team can work together sustainably

  • Set clear expectations

  • Develop trust with and amongst the team

  • Handle within-team conflicts

  • Ensure that the team learns from their work and consistently improves

  • Load-balance work effectively

  • Hires well in a way that grows the capability of the team as a whole

• Orchestrate consistent terrific outcomes from a team:

  • Informal project management skills

  • Keep track of multiple things that are going on at once

  • Consistently direct focus to the highest-priority outcomes

  • Makes good decisions under uncertainty

  • Maintain the outputs at appropriate levels of technical quality, speed, budget, effort, or whatever other metrics are relevant 

• Interact in an ongoing and successful way with clients and stakeholders:

  • Understand who the team is delivering good outcomes for

  • Be able to communicate effectively with those internal or external clients

  • Be able to identify shifting priorities

  • Be able to translate those back to the team

You can demonstrate standard management skills without being a manager…

Only the single most dramatic and hopefully rare version of any of these ~20 items - actually firing someone - is something only a person with a manager title can demonstrate the ability to do.   You can demonstrate skills in these other areas as an individual contributor.  Even “hires well” can be approximated by selecting interns or assembling an ad-hoc project team to take on some task.

But local context matters

Now, different places will place different degrees of emphasis on particular parts of this broad set of skills.  Ultimately, management is about enabling groups of people to work together to sustainably produce great results, and what that looks like will vary widely depending on the kinds of results a team needs to achieve, and how people work together (the culture) of that part of that organization. So I can’t tell you which of these is most important for you.

In fact, it’s because of the importance of local context that people are very hesitant to hire a manager someone from outside the organization who hasn’t managed before.   Becoming a first-time manager is a hard enough shift, as is trying to figure out how to manage in a new context.  Asking someone to successfully making both transitions at once is not setting them up for success, and so people mostly prefer to avoid the situation.

But all managers became first-time managers once, and so that almost always happens somewhere they’re already working.

Find out what’s most important, and match that to past experiences

Whether it’s at your current workplace or somewhere else, then, understanding some of that local context (by direct observation, or through informational interviews with people who work there) is very helpful.  Which of those categories of skills is particularly valued in that part of that organization?  Which are considered secondary, or someone else’s job?  What were people doing there before they became managers, typically?

The job ad will give you some of that information, of course.  But what’s written down in the job ad may be well-thought out carefully curated essentials, or may be copy-and-paste boilerplate from the last five times the job was filled.   So “X years of direct reports” might be a hard requirement, or it might be a “nice to have”.  There’s no real way to know without talking to someone.  And people who are actively hiring are normally pretty happy to talk to potential candidates.

(This can feel a little more awkward if you’re looking for jobs in or near the team you’re currently working in, but it doesn’t have to be.  “I saw this job ad and realized I’d be interested in that kind of role, either now or in the future.   What kinds of skills make for a really effective manager here?  How could I start growing so that I’d be ready for such a role, in the near term or further down the line?” can be the beginning of a really good and potentially ongoing discussion).

Between the general behaviours above and local priorities and job description requirements, there’s a list of some things you’d like to be able to demonstrate.  Going through that list and thinking of stories from your work history to answer questions of the form “tell me about a time you [demonstrated behaviour X]” is a good way to start a self-assessment of how ready you are for that particular role (or at least the interview).

Note that you do not:

• Have to have a good answer for every single item on the list - if you’ve got 50% or so then that likely makes you a plausible candidate

• Have to have a separate story to demonstrate each point - you can probably cover most of them with just a handful of stories.

Once you’ve assembled those stories together, you can also start thinking about higher-level questions.  What’s your approach to management - what are some common values or approaches that tie together the answers you’ve sketched out?  What are ways you approach things that are different than you’ve seen before, and what are role models you try to follow that are the same? When you look back on those stories, what are things they demonstrate that you value in team mates?   Or that you avoid?  What you look for in challenges?   Where have your successes lay?  What have been recurring areas where you have challenges?  Have the stories ready first, rather than trying to answer those with your first reaction - what do the stories reveal about how you actually approach these things? 

Find opportunities to fill-in gaps

If you start to feel like you’re not ready yet, whether it’s from this exercise or the discussions you’ve had leading up to it, now at least you’ve identified some specific gaps.  Like we saw, none of those experience gaps are really something you have to already be a manager to fill.  Almost any new responsibility for you will be an opportunity to grow in one of those areas. 

• Working with interns, or trainees, helping onboard new staff members, or even just mentoring existing staff members in skills you already know well provide opportunities for the "Ensure that the individuals in the team grow and develop” cluster of behaviours

• Getting assigned lead on some project gives you opportunities to develop "Orchestrate consistent terrific outcomes from a team” or "Ensure the team can work together sustainably” behaviours

• Any kinds of interactions with clients/stakeholders (even if the “stakeholders” initially are just your manager and coworkers) and understanding their needs and priorities and making decisions accordingly will help you develop that cluster of behaviours.

Choosing which one to focus on and how to grow there is something that your manager can help with, but talking it over with almost anyone will help.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t try taking significant additional growth-opportunity responsibilities without discussions with your team or manager.

For one thing, you can’t very well start mentoring other team members against their will.

For another thing, some of this “glue work” is both under-recognized (and so could hurt you if doing it means down-prioritizing tasks you’re being asked to do) and can actually cause problems if you start doing it without visibility into what’s going on in the broader organization. A recent article by Sean Goedecke, “Glue Work Considered Harmful”, expresses a rather strong form of this argument, and a thoughtful comment on lobster.rs expands on this.

Some other resources from the newsletter:

• I talked a little bit about a similar question in #129, too - Getting Ready For Management

• The follow-up, #130, covered how to handle a new responsibility if you’re given an opportunity to take something on to grow your skills.

Readers, what do you wish you knew before taking on your first management or team lead role? Any thoughts you want too share? Leave a comment, or email me at [email protected].

And now, on to the roundup!

Managing Individuals

Two Useful Prompts to Explore Intent & Behaviour - Adrian Howard

Have you ever seen the website tvtropes? (I feel like I should post a content warning for that link, it’s like going to wikipedia for the first time - you can get lost down rabbit holes.) The basic idea of the site is that there’s a finite number of story lines and story characters we are deeply, innately, familiar with, and they all interact with each other.

Because there’s all of these well-trod story paths in our heads, it’s very, very easy for us to take a situation that’s going on with an individual we manage and assume that we’re seeing one of those stories playing out, casting the individual in the role of one of the archetype characters.

Sometimes this is a good approximation to the truth! And sometimes it is a wildly unfair extrapolation of something else entirely.

Like Howard, I am very wary about the dangerous but usually well-intentioned piece of advice, “always assume good intent”. That advice has really ugly failure modes in the presence of people with ill intent, and those failure modes play out especially badly for members of groups who already face unnecessary barriers in the workplace.

Howard presents a better version of that advice, especially for those of us with scientific and hypothesis-testing backgrounds:

• “What other possible explanations could there be?”

• “How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?”

Managing Teams

Just Hard Work - Michael Lopp

A free leadership community I'm part of (and maybe you should be too!) is the famous Rands Leadership Slack.

In this post Michael Lopp ("Rands") reflects on the steady, consistent work - combined with lots of listening - that's required to build a large community and keep it healthy. And he shares how his work on the community had to change as it grew; and that he had to listen and change some of his preconceptions for the community to really thrive.

This is true of stewardship of any system of human beings, including the teams we lead (or aim to lead).

We might imagine dramatic scenes of ourselves as brave leaders rallying our team in a trying situation, finally and valiantly triumphing in the face of defeat. But the real work is more like gardening. (#137) Slow and steady. Consistent nurturing. Vigilance for malnourishment - and weeds and pests, too, but even in those cases, it's less a dramatic leap into action than a practiced steady hand setting things right.

Innovation Thrives On Diversity - Tom Goldsmith, Orbit Policy’s Deep Dives

In a number of jurisdictions in the next few years, those of us in leadership positions are going to be hearing a drumbeat of people chanting lines about how diversity is bad or at least has gone too far, etc.

They’re wrong.

We know they’re wrong the same way we know lots of other things about the world — it’s been meticulously researched and studied and analyzed.

We actually know from countless studies that diverse groups generate more and better ideas, are more adept at problem solving, and are generally more resilient than monocultures.

And that is especially important in teams that are charged with being innovative and at the leading edge, which is generally the teams we’re being asked to lead.

Goldsmith, who has a great newsletter, briefly highlights just a few of the recent studies on the benefits to innovative teams of (for instance) gender and ethnic diversity.

Remember, your scientific background is a superpower; use it, rely on science and analysis. and don’t be swept along with passing and ugly fads. Support and grow your team members, and make sure your team has the breadth of experiences and backgrounds that ensures the best possible range of ideas and competencies.

Managing Within Organizations

Project Communications You Should Send This Year - Elizabeth Harrin, Rebel’s Guide to Project Management

Harrin’s Rebel's Guide to Project Management is a great resource for project management advice, and much of the material extends quite broadly to any effort involving multiple people.

This recent is a good read as work gears back up after the holidays. We PhDs can default to being kind of heads-down hands-on getting things done. Consistent proactive communications with stakeholders - anything from "there's a problem but we're doing X" (#1) to just a small thank you (#6) or why we're making a given recommendation (#9) can make a huge difference in our own visibility and in how easy it is to work with those stakeholders.

How to get more headcount - Will Larson, Irrational Exuberance

This is a good article by Will Larson not just about getting more money to hire more people on your team, but really about how to be more successful making any big request.

Larson spells out multiple layers of context that have to be agreed upon to make progress:

1. Do we agree on the problem to be solved?

2. Do we agree on the general approach to solving that problem?

3. What evidence do we have that earlier problems are being solved well?

4. Alignment on the details of solving particular topic at hand.

As people steeped in the problem and with a strong sense of the solution, we tend to leap right into the discussion at step 4. But if the decision maker isn’t there with us, it’s going to go poorly.

A more general case of this approach, when there’s multiple stakeholders involved in the decision, is “pre-wiring” - making sure you’re building support for your proposal before the big meeting. Here, too, you have to make sure that start engagement at the right level of Larson’s hierarchy.

Managing Your Own Career

When is a Manager Ready to Become a Director? - Chris Seifert

This article is a good bookend to the discussion above on getting ready to become a manager.

Beyond the requirements for being a good manager, Seifert talks about some of the new requirements that a potential director must have:

• Broadened Scope

• More complex decision-making

• Coaching and leading managers

• Maintaining some communication with individual contributors and other stakeholders

And goes into them in some detail.

One thing I’d add to this about complex decision making - as a team lead or manager, you get ICs asking you to weigh in on a decision that the individual was having trouble making. The things that are easy or clear to individuals don’t make it to you.

As you get to senior manager or director or senior director, you’re getting asked to weigh in on decisions that have stumped not just the one person, but entire teams or “families” of teams. The easier questions just don’t make it to you (and rightly so). So it becomes even more important to have good decision processes in place, and good “pre-decisions” made such as consistently valuing A over B. I talk about that a little bit in #158, Management Decisions For Researchers.

That’s It…

And that’s it for this issue! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.

I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks; best of luck in that time with your team,

Jonathan