In my experience, one of the best ways to grow is to talk to people. Whether you’re looking for marketing advice to incorporate into your day-to-day tactics or insights on how to improve your people management skills — there are so many people who’ve been in your shoes and who are already experts in your domain. Learning from the experiences of those who’ve already found their footing is invaluable.
That’s why we’ve rounded up the best advice from incredible leaders who are currently in the trenches. Each one of these leaders has written a letter for you, a first-time manager, with the hopes of imparting some lessons they’ve learned the hard way.
Anjuan Simmons: You’ll have to let go
Dear first-time manager…
You’ll have to let go.
Congratulations on your promotion to manager! You’ve reached the culmination of years of hard work cultivating a variety of skills and finding solutions to problems that others struggled to crack. However, I have some news for you. You’ll have to let go of a lot of the things that made you a great candidate to become a manager.
The first thing you’ll need to let go of is understanding the detailed day-to-day work of the team. When I made the leap from individual contributor (IC) to manager, this was one of the hardest things to accept. After all, my super power as an IC was knowing everything I needed to do in deep detail and figuring out how to get things done. I tried to keep this “close to the details” mindset when I became a manager, but that limited my ability to focus on the overall health of the team. I didn’t step back from the trees to see how the forest was doing. When I received some timely feedback from my senior manager about this, I quickly (but begrudgingly) left the details to my team. I almost immediately saw the benefit of having lots of mind space freed up to really “see” my team and meet their needs outside of getting code to production.
The second thing you’ll need to let go of is the empty spaces in your calendar. As an IC, a big part of your job was finding large stretches of time to get into the deep thinking state necessary for solving complex problems in code. If you were lucky, your manager tried to keep you out of meetings so that you could have lots of time for maintaining in-depth level of focus. As a manager, the opposite will be true. You’ll find your calendar filled up with meetings with very little spent outside meetings. Most days, you’ll even have very little time between meetings. Your bladder won’t enjoy this. However, this meeting time is important because you’ll be building crucial context for the team. Are changes coming to the CI/CD pipelines because DevOps has implemented a new deployment tool? You’ll want to help your team prepare for how that will impact their work. Is the product team changing how they gather information from customers to help your company build more delightful solutions? That’s information your team needs to know so that they can also be involved in better understanding the people who keep your business alive.
Failure to let go of the details and empty spaces on your calendar will limit your effectiveness as a manager and also put a lid on the performance level of your team. You absolutely should put guardrails around the team and clearly communicate your expectations, but you have to trust your people to work in the team while you work on the team.
I know you’ll do great! You’re awesome. I look forward to hearing about your success as you make the journey towards becoming an experienced manager!
Oh, don’t forget to pee.
Your friend,
Anjuan Simmons
Engineering Coach at Help Scout
Heather Foeh: Give feedback early and often
Dear first-time manager…
Give feedback early and often.
Giving feedback can be difficult, especially the first few times. My advice: don’t wait! You will actually feel a lot better if address an issue quickly (within the same week it happened) rather than letting it fester. Plus, if you let too much time pass you may be tempted not to give the feedback after all.
When you give feedback in a timely manner it’s actually less of a big deal to your employee, but when you wait several weeks or (God forbid!) until their annual review, then it blows the incident out of proportion.
Sincerely,
Heather Foeh
Director, Workfront Customer Marketing at Adobe
Alessandra Colaci: Be specific with your goals
Dear first-time manager…
Be specific with your goals.
In order for a team to rally around something, they need to understand 2 things:
1. The “why”
Convey the vision for the company and your specific team. Don’t be generic about it. Get to the root of the purpose of your business. For example, “We want to help small businesses grow their revenue by 2x”.
2. How to achieve those goals: get specific.
The people you manage can be set up for success by understanding exact goals, metrics, and timelines for their area of responsibility. Even if there’s overlap, have only 1 person own each metric. Also, convey how those goals relate to each other. For example, “Jane owns SEO content which will drive 1,000 site visits each week. Then Alice owns opt-ins and will convert 10% of those visits to subscribers.”
Sincerely,
Alessandra Colaci
VP, Marketing at Mailshake
Amanda Natividad: Teach people to advocate for themselves in business terminology
Dear first-time manager…
Teach people to advocate for themselves in business terminology.
One of the best things a first-time manager can do is properly advocate themselves using business jargon. But even better? Teaching that skill to their direct report(s). The ability to teach this shows true mastery.
Advocating for yourself in a professional setting goes deeper than just speaking up when you need help, or asking for that promotion. It means making the business case and logical reasoning for why you deserve these things. It means shifting your mindset from, “I deserve this promotion because I’m loyal and I work hard,” to “I deserve this promotion because I improved efficiencies and yielded a positive return on that investment.”
Sincerely,
Amanda Natividad
Marketing Architect at SparkToro
Jocelyn Brown: Use every interaction as an opportunity to learn
Dear first-time manager…
Use every interaction as an opportunity to learn.
Leading people opens up a whole new way to learn. While no doubt your team will learn things from you, they are also possibly your best teachers. Asking for input on what you’re thinking, what you’re observing, and ideas you have will both help you make better decisions and keep you aligned with them and their reality.
You will never have all the answers but leading a team gives you access to a broader set of inputs than you had before.
Sincerely,
Jocelyn Brown
Former SVP, Customers and Revenue
Nael El Shawwa: Solution space vs. problem space vs. the mess
Dear first-time manager…
Remember: Solution space vs. problem space vs. the mess
Like most folks, the first part of my career I spent mostly in the Solution Space. Someone gave you problems and you figured out how to create solutions. Sometimes you had to go back and clarify or change parts of the problem. The solution space wasn’t easy, but it was familiar.
In my first engineering management job I thought I would still spend most of my time in the solution space. I hadn’t fully realized that I had to shift my mindset to this new problem space. That took some time to learn. I defaulted to jumping into the familiar “solution space” with my team when I thought we weren’t going in the right direction, or we weren’t going fast enough. At the time that made sense. I didn’t realize that that was happening because the problem space was not defined properly and it was actually my new job to make sure it’s defined properly.
As you progress further in your management career you become involved in multiple problem spaces, some isolated, some overlapping. You’re also growing new leaders that in turn must take on the responsibility of shifting their mindset to the problem space. You have to learn how to delegate problems (not solutions) to your new leaders. You have successfully delegated all the problems away. What on earth do you do now?
Congratulations, you now own “The Mess”. The Mess is where all problems are created from. But that’s advice for another time.
Sincerely,
Nael El Shawwa
Head of Engineering at Perpetua
Corine Tan: A little gratitude goes a long way
Dear first-time manager…
A little gratitude goes a long way.
Gratitude is a great way to build a connection with your team and do some self-reflection. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day that we forget to thank and recognize folks that do the most for us. There’s plenty of research that shows the positive benefits of regular gratitude practice on mental health, productivity, and trust. The problem is making gratitude a habit.
For our team, we always make it a point to do Zoom gratitude circles at the end of each week. I first encountered this practice while at Techstars. We sat in a meeting of almost thirty individuals and took the hour to each appreciate one person. Our managing director started and picked a person. The chosen person would share their person, and so on. This exercise is extremely heartfelt and intimate, a few tears were shed when we expressed how much other Techstars founders and mentors meant to us. Doing this regularly with our team has done wonders for keeping us tight and building trust while remote.
Sincerely,
Corine Tan
Co-Founder of Kona
Benyamin Elias: Get your team to think for themselves
Dear first-time manager…
Get your team to think for themselves.
First-time managers often think the manager’s role is to teach their team, or to be very involved in what the team produces (and for that reason, tend to hire less experienced team members). In fact, a team becomes much more effective if the manager delegates as much as possible—not just the work, but the thinking behind the work.
When the team starts to think for themselves, more stuff gets done, higher quality stuff gets done, and the manager has more freedom to look for new ways to make the team more effective.
Sincerely,
Benyamin Elias
Director of Growth Marketing at Podia
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