Reluctant managers: Tell me your story

In My Humble Opinion
1

My manager informed me that our division director has plans for my department. These plans may involve me being “strongly encouraged” to take a team lead position.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’ve never seen myself as the managerial type. I am not lazy or timid, mind you, but I rather like not having to go to meetings every day or stressing out about shit after business hours. But I do have the basic skills. For instance, the other day my manager’s boss leaned on me to ghost write a sternly worded letter for him. I shared it with a colleague and she told me it was “scary good”–while looking at me like I’d just grown a third eye or something. So I do know how to talk the talk, I guess, and this probably makes me seem like a good candidate for management. But I don’t know if I’m capable of walking the walk just as well.

Some people are born wanting to be in charge, while others just kind of end up being dropped into that position without really wanting it. If you are in that second group, how has it been? Does being “boss” eventually grow on you? Or is it something that always sucks? I enjoy my job at its current level, so it is scary to think I might give up some happiness by accepting a promotion.

2

I was in a similar position a number of years ago. I reluctantly accepted a management position of a research group of about 13 people. I spent about four years doing it, but never enjoyed it. I felt like I was assigning all the fun work to other people! When a job more to my liking popped up in another area of the company, I jumped at it.

My advice, try it, you might like it. But have an exit strategy in case you don’t!

3

Good advice. But don’t lean too heavily on the exit strategy, which might be too tempting!!

The other alternative is to have a frank discussion about what your prospect are for advancement as an individual contributor. I worked at a company that went out of its way to have a parallel career path for individual contributors so they wouldn’t “max out”. If you really don’t want to try out the management position, maybe you can work out some sort of arrangement that allows you to advance while staying an individual contributor.

4

I happen to think reluctant managers are the best ones. They aren’t vain, political and cynical, they know the job and the people, and they focus on being the kind of manager they themselves would want to have.

But reluctant managers might be unhappy at the position. Try it, like Tim. T. Mortiss said. and have an exit strategy. It is honorable to have been promoted, and nowadays it looks equally honorable to say: “tried it, not for me” and step down or away again.

FWIW, I think you would make a good manager.

5

I’ve done it twice and hated it both times. I don’t really want to be responsible for someone who gets in late. The bad employees always blame you for their choices. And sometimes you have to let good people go because of economics. You are stuck between people who think you have power you don’t have, and upper management, who sees you as a conduit for communications down (and sometimes, in good companies, up).

6

I like mentoring people. I dislike being responsible for people who don’t throw themselves into their projects with the same commitment I, as the person held accountable, have to have.

I’ve seen this with salespeople. Most of the good ones I’ve known hate both managing and being managed. I know one company that handled it by putting top performers in training and trouble-shooting roles, but avoiding the line management duties they despised.

7

The problem with accepting a management position that you don’t want or are not tempermentally suited for is that it is often difficult to step down unless there have been complaints from subordinates or problems with upper management, in which case you will likely be invited to leave or will just find the job made sufficiently difficult such that you will seek other employment on your own. My personal experience is in accepting a management position (somewhat reluctantly) rather than leave a managerial void when my manager retired and putting forth extraordinary effort (to the tuneof 70+ hour weeks) to try my best to protect and provide resources for my people while making committments that were outside of my control, only to find that another manager at my level was jealous and made petty attempts to undermine me while our director did nothing to support decisions and actively avoided doing anything to “rock the boat”, including not allowing me to take formal disciplinary action against an employee who was blatantly not doing work, disappearing during the day, and disrupting the workplace until he outright physically threatened another employee, at which time I sent an e-mail to our (useless) HR rep and chief director with the kind of incindiary language that cannot be ignored, after which I was repeatedly disciplined for not following the very procedures I was denied authority to pursue and being blamed for the behavior of an employee that I had warned was on this path for months. Oh, and HR exists solely to protect the company and will do exactly jack shit to suppport or protect you as a manager if it exposes them to even the vaguest whiff of liability or causes them to extend any effort.

So, if you really aren’t jazzed about being in management and wanting to move up the chain beyond the shittastic line manager position, I would strongly advise against accepting the position. On the other hand, I have to admit that I’ve been recruited for positions based upon just having “manager” on a job title, but they were positions I didn’t really want or felt were a particularly good fit.

Also, watch Glengarry Glen Ross; if you don’t sympathize with the Kevin Spacey character, you don’t want to be a manager. Or, just watch it anyway; it’s a great movie, worth watching for Jack Lemmon’s performance alone not to mention the monologue by Alec Baldwin, written by Mamet specifically for Baldwin the film.

Stranger

8

Hmm… Moved into ‘management’ at my last job years ago. It was fine for the most part, but I did not enjoy having to review people. I actually gave one fellow an honest review, and was called on the carpet from MY boss for doing so. The fellow that I gave a poor review was working two 40 an hour week jobs and was basically asleep on his feet.

I got in trouble for that.

At my current position, I’m pretty much at the ceiling unless I went into management. I’m in a bit of a supervisory spot and make nearly as much as my boss. My co-workers have begged me to take the role of manager if my boss leaves. I might if they double my generous salary. But maybe not even then.

9

At my last company, my boss was fired, and I was asked to step in and manage the team, which means going from a peer role to manager role with a group of people that I knew well, and they knew me well. I had managed before, and I knew it was not my preference, but I did it because it was the right thing to do for the team and for the company. Managed the team for a little over a year before moving onto a new company.

Been at the new company about 6 months, and we are growing. I’ve been approached by my manager’s manager (VP of Human Resources) about accepting a management role, again managing people I’ve been working with as a peer.

I’ve said I’m not interested, but I have a feeling they are going to ask again.

If you know you don’t want to manage, I think you shouldn’t do it. But then again, I’ve ignored my own advice once, and might again. I will add this, even with my reluctance to be a manager, I am pretty good at it. Maybe there is something to the old adage that the best leaders are those who don’t strive to be leaders.

10

I was offered a managerial position when my boss left the company. I wasn’t sure I felt up to it.

I went to the library and read a few easy books on the subject, mostly The First-Time Manager by Loren Belker (1st edition, but I see it’s been revised with additional authors).

It looked reasonably easy, and the guys were saying they’d like to have me as a boss. So I accepted the position. I ended up managing a team of 6 software developers and one application engineer.

The first few months were all right, my subordinates were helping and management was understanding. After two years, though, I was pretty tired of it. I was no longer able to write code because there was so much to manage (and the president kept telling me that there was about 30 minutes’ worth of management to do every week!). And I had a bad tendency to do things myself instead of delegating.

After 3 years, I was out of my depth. I just couldn’t juggle enough balls at the same time.

After about 3-and-a-half years, I told the president I was no longer interested, and was thinking of quitting altogether. He brought in an outside resource to replace me – a guy who had filled that position several years earlier. I ended up assistant director, in effect serving as an advisor to the new-old director, but finally writing code again!

11

When I found myself unexpectedly made manager (well, actually, being followed by a bunch of people who wanted to kill imaginary orcs) I turned out to be pretty good at it. A lot of the work wasn’t so different from all those childhood tasks of being the oldest child present and therefore in charge of making sure the rest returned to their parents with the same amount of eyes, ears, fingers and toes with which I’d received them. In fact, adults were so much easier to manage! Later I took other managerial activities or positions, and I’ve consistently been good at it. I adapt my managing style to the style of the people I’m managing, so that I get consistent good results with a few exceptions (namely, people who directly refuse to take direction from me and whose official managers back them up). There are some types of people I find easier to manage than others, but so long as the type of subordinate isn’t “asshole”, we do good.
Right now I’ve got a job title that says “manager” (no actual management position, it’s just my level in the company) and I want to get the actual job because dammit I’m good at it.

My immediate manager seems to be neck-deep into the Doer Trap. He’s not doing his management bits and keeps grabbing tasks his subordinates are supposed to do; he’s our biggest bottleneck :frowning: Dude has good intentions but very bad results.

12

I was never a manager to the exclusion of actual work, but had management duties thrust upon me at one point on top of the creative nitty-gritty that was my job.

HAAAAAAAATED it.

Personality-wise, I have a very, very strong aversion to anything that even slightly resembles babysitting an adult. If you are an adult, I expect you to be capable of managing yourself. If you can’t, get out of my way and leave me alone.

And in this particular case, despite training and retraining the intern I was responsible for, and reiterating OFTEN how important attention to detail was, after 3-4 months he was still making the same careless, stupid mistakes in his work. What we were doing wasn’t complicated (very basic HTML, nothing else), but it required precision in the code because email clients are much less forgiving of typos than web browsers are.

So, I DID have to babysit him, and literally check all of his work myself. This “delegation” was supposed to relieve some of my workload, but when you’re examining buckets of code for a misplaced semi-colon, it would have been faster and better quality to just do all the work myself to begin with. So I had even MORE work than if I’d remained the sole person handling the projects.

That was enough to convince me that I never wanted to “manage” people. I want to do the work. I’m not interested in watching (or forcing) other people to do the work. The worst part though – remember how I said I wasn’t really a manager? Yeah, I had no authority to fire this kid, which I sure would have after retraining him on the exact same stuff for three months straight.

Oh, I also had a contract gig where I was bait n switched between the (FOUR HOUR!!) interview – where they asked me what kind of advice I could give them as a consultant / subject matter expert – and my first day at work, where I discovered that literally everything we’d discussed in the interview had been outsourced to an outside vendor. What was my job? Well, they called me a “project manager,” but other than that I have no idea, because they couldn’t / wouldn’t tell me what they actually wanted me to do. I had no defined responsibilities and I had to beg them for tasks – whereupon they’d give me one single ridiculous task and call it good. They ran out a multi-thousand dollar budget just to have me sitting around their office twiddling my thumbs.

And the tasks were ridiculous – multiple cases where I’d ask what they wanted me to do, and they would then dictate an email for me to send to the department managers. While I’m wondering how they got the impression that I was a secretary or that I knew shorthand or any other useful taking-of-dictation skill. Or why they wanted to spend five minutes dictating and another five having me type up an email that maybe somewhat resembled what they said because I don’t write longhand fast enough to keep up with someone speaking – instead of just taking 2 minutes to type and send their own damn emails where they could say exactly what they meant. And then of course after that needless ten-minute task, I went back to having nothing to do. Ah, corporate efficiency.

The best part about this one was that they were so impressed by me (for doing what?!) that they asked me back for some other project some months later. I declined.

Never. Again.

13

I have pursued management not because it’s my calling in life, but because it’s my way of cutting down on the number of incompetent nutjobs over me. I also know I’m better than average at it (at least compared to my two last bosses). Having some control over projects and seeing my ideas executed is rewarding, but dealing with personnel issues, paperwork, underperforming employees who actually think they are superstars, and back-to-back meetings about a whole bunch of nothingness is annoying. So is constantly having to do damage control for my boss, who left to her own devices would probably burn down the entire department. I swear, a quarter of my time is spent advising her on minute tasks, watching her then do the opposite of what I recommended, and then sopping up the resulting mess.

That said, my job could be worse. I still do technical work and that recharges me. Eventually I will probably have to give some of that up, though. So I’m trying to get myself used to the idea “doing” through my employees. Having the ability to hire fresh talent gives me hope that this is possible. My existing staff is okay, but many of them are so stuck in their ways (due to not being held sufficiently accountable by previous supervisors) that they are difficult to direct without a lot of coaxing and cajoling. And some of them lack the drive and skill needed to do the work that we really should be doing. These are things that continuously grated me as a non-supervisor, and they will grate on me now as supervisor. But at least I can do something about it now.

14

Think of it this way… The employees do not work for you, rather you work for them!

It is the job of a good manager to see that the employees have the right tools to do their job - see that their needs are taken care of. Sort of like a parent.

So they will need this or that. Then you see they get what they need to do their job. Then the work gets done.

Sounds to me like you would make a good manager.

15

I will go further than that and say that it is the job of a line manager (one directly supervising people producing actual work products) to protect their people from the whims of upper management and run interference on requests and directives that interfere with their work. I know one organization which shall remain nameless that is widely praised for its “flat management structure”, but in which upper managers are essentially free to dismiss employees for little more than disagreeing in a technical meeting or having a “wrong look” on their face with no protection by line management. This ends up being highly disruptive as an employee with a useful idea or who produces valued work may be zeroed out, taking with them all of the experience and knowledge which is often poorly documented, leaving a project or task in shambles as the replacement person struggles to pick it up and ends up redoing all of the work.

I came personally at odds with my management by refusing to acquiesce to demands to second employees to worthless proposal efforts, pointless dog & pony shows, or lend them to other competing organizations just because Joe Bozo feels like the Northern Idaho office of favored subcontractor needs a “mainframe” computer (“You mean a beowulf cluster? We haven’t used mainframe computers since the 'Eighties.”) for its non-analyst field engineers in the notion that we’ll be able to transfer work from my ‘expensive’ employees (whose labor wrap rate is largely driven by the corporate overhead imposed from above, thankyouverymuch) to the ‘cheap’ employees regardless of actual skill set or experience. The issue finally came to a head when I demonstrated that I was quantitatively incapable of completing all of the work which was budgeted without demanding 3000+ hr/year out of every employee, and yet was told that I could not only hire any new engineers but I’d have to recind standing requisitions that I’d spent time vetting and interviewing candidates to fill.

If you have any doubt about getting adequate support from your upper management and don’t have a tolerance for that kind of bullshititude, do not take the job. If you do take the job, get agreements in writing about salary pool, training budget, and other support that you expect your people to need, because if you don’t get it up front the odds are good you won’t get what you need, or at all if the organization is desperately trying to reduce costs everywhere possible so the C-level execs can justify their seven figure performance bonuses.

Stranger

16

I never wanted to be a people leader, but my career naturally took me there. I had a team of about 15 people for a few years and found that there were certain aspects that I really enjoyed (helping people grow in their own careers, for instance, was surprisingly rewarding!) There were definitely aspects that I hated, including the paperwork and the ‘tough conversations’ about performance, etc. I also had a very hard time learning to let go of direct ownership of certain things…

Ultimately I moved on and no longer have a team, but it was good experience. So I guess my advice is, be open to it, you might be surprised. And if it turns out you really dislike it, keep on the lookout for your next move.

17

Thanks for all the words of wisdom. I’ve decided that if I’m not going to accept a team lead position. A 3% bump in pay isn’t worth the headache of time cards and performance evaluations, but more importantly, I don’t think I’d be good at it. I like challenges as much as the next person, but I like having low blood pressure even more.

Apparently there’s another kind of position for people with the chops to serve in a technical expert role. Unfortunately, these positions are very rare. But I figure if a new department is being carved out, maybe someone can work some HR voodoo and make it happen. I’ll float this idea if the time comes. Otherwise, I’m content with where I am.

(Today I spent a half an hour trying to assure my very stressed out boss that the fire that has just popped up is not going to burn us alive. So yeah, I’m content with where I am.)