Croatto co uk

I have been a manager off and on for about 8 years, I have grown teams, seen teams shrink, shedded reports, gained new ones. I think I am good¹ at it.

What I like about being a manager is helping my team members. How can they grow, being a trusted confidant, an accountability partner, a mentor, a critic, etc. I also believe in being honest (radical candor it may be called, there is a book), but only when it helps the person and they are open to it.

There are aspects of doing right by the team, company, organization, office, etc. that you have to be a good spin master, but also honest, lay out the truths, share the gotchas and the unknowns. Be clear about the journey as much as you can see and share how much or little you and the people around are going to be there for it. For example,

“This work that we/you are going to be doing has to get done. It’s not exciting, it’s alright. The advantage I see is the [insert timeframe] and [insert problem] with [insert the people or other conditions]. My thought is if X, Y, and Z happen this will be whatever comes out, even if we hit X and Z or just Y and Z, in x months we’ll launch we’ll see what is next and my theory is A, B, C…”

What I don’t like about being a manager is managing people that work on disparate projects together with disparate teams and they aren’t REALLY related. Being under the same umbrella organization isn’t enough. The people are great (the individuals aren’t the problem). But when you manage you tend to be seen as the leader of whatever your reports are working on². And if that is the case that multiples the knowledge, understanding, cognitive load and context switching to your plate.

If you happen to lead and manage a team and area that are aligned, this is okay and this goes into the first bucket of “what I like about being a manager”

There is little impact on what you can do without escalating something, having to have 3+ meetings with 6+ cross functional stakeholders, to maybe come up with a resolution. It’s hard enough when a partner and a report disagree and you and the partners manager don’t agree to come to some sort of resolution, or don’t agree on approaches.

Something else, review cycles, getting feedback, telling people no on promotion, etc. I don’t really dislike most of this, I am more than happy to review people, give feedback (I saw this and expected that. This was really good. Where do we go from here? I know this wasn’t ideal, is there anything else that we could do to make the outcome better, or the next version, etc? Or thinking retrospectively about where it went right or wrong, was there a pivot?). Review cycles suck when your people aren’t going up, or having to say that unless the business case is clear, even though you are amazing and check off 70% of the requirements there is no reason to be promoted yet.³

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Why am I writing this and thinking about this, well I was made a manager again and I think that what I don’t like about being a manager this time around is what I articulated earlier about managing people across disconnected groups/products. So then the artifact of your work as a manager is just the people, and I am a creative person. I enjoy solving problems with others, and my toolbox is that of design and storytelling.

When I recently (Jan 2024) changed teams, it’s now September 18, 2024, I was really enjoying getting back to design, senior IC thinking. The organization at large was supportive of these senior individual contributors (IC). I had the latitude because of my time and tenure to design, negotiate, chat with others, come up with ideas of solutions that solved my immediate team's need, but also brought ideas for solutions to tangential challenges from neighboring teams that had parallel or connected user journeys.

One of my strengths is that I can orient myself in a space or domain quickly and have aligned sympathy with the users, their processes, goals, where it sits in the larger organization and ideate like I know what I am doing.