In my last post I suggested that anyone considering the leap to management first consider at least three things:
- Why do you want this job?
- Money won’t fill the void
- Know yourself and what you enjoy
If you do this job for money or prestige (ha!), then you are most likely very unhappy. So why should someone consider taking on the leadership role? Here are the main reasons I took the leap:
- To have a home life. I knew that there were processes and procedures that would help us stop reacting to the latest thing that broke so we could go home at night. My measure of success here was getting out of the office before 6 PM and to make it through the evening without being called by work. Previously, I was on the phone from 6 AM to 10 / 10:30 PM every week day handling trouble calls.
- To make a positive difference in my work place. I knew that if our support groups knew more about our systems and how to install and troubleshoot them, then all of us would be happier. We went from frustration and finger pointing to working together to identify, track, and fix systemic problems. My measure of success here was both subjective and objective: other groups brought problems to our attention so we could fix them, and all of our reliability metrics improved by 50% – 80%.
While these were the main reasons I took the job, the main reason that I continue to be in leadership is that I can help people. This has been my biggest surprise and source of enjoyment. I’ve hired many, many people and have helped develop most of them into good engineers. These engineers:
- have a deserved sense of confidence
- they understand their business
- they understand their roles
- they know which skills they need to succeed in their job, and the skills needed to be promoted
- they know communication is one of their most important jobs
- they understand that good change management prevents service interruptions (and being called into the office in the middle of the night)
Don’t go into management if you don’t want to spend time developing your people. They are your force multiplier. They police themselves and each other when you are not around. They are the ones who decide whether to do the right thing or to take short cuts, and you can’t achieve 5 9′s reliability, 95% change success and 5% time spent on unplanned work without having your people on board.
Still think you want to tackle this job? Keep reading as we talk more about making the difficult transition of going from subject matter expert to leader. It’s a wild, humbling and often rewarding ride.
