At some point in most careers, someone asks if you want to manage people. Or maybe you start asking yourself that question. Or you may think that’s the only answer.
Sometimes it’s triggered by a manager planting a seed in a 1:1, sometimes it’s a job posting that floats past your feed, sometimes it’s just the quiet assumption built into most career ladders that “up” means “manager.”
I want to pause on that assumption, not because leading a team is the wrong choice because for a great many people it’s deeply rewarding. But I’ve seen too many good people take on management because it felt like the expected next step, and then find themselves in a job they don’t actually want, with no clean way out.
Here’s the thing I have learned over the years … people management is not a promotion, it’s a career change.
The skills that make you great at your work, learning the craft, the instinct, the ability to produce something excellent, are not the exact same skills that make you a good manager. Management asks something different from you. You have to find genuine energy in being accountable for someone else’s success. Not just tolerating it, not managing it, actually caring about it. Sitting in a 1:1 that goes off-script and feeling like that was time well spent. Having a hard conversation with someone who’s struggling and walking away feeling like you helped, not just that you “handled it”.
If that sounds exhausting rather than meaningful, that’s not a character flaw to overcome, that’s your brain telling you something.
I’ve had good managers and I’ve had bad ones. The difference, almost every time, wasn’t intelligence or experience. It was whether they actually wanted the job they were doing, and how they brought empathy, drive and support to help me.
The bad ones were often very capable people who’d been promoted because they were good at the work. They didn’t stop caring about the work, they just now had to do it at a slightly removed altitude, through other people, and that distance ate at them. It came out as micromanagement, or detachment, or the particular frustration of someone who knows exactly how they’d do the thing and has to watch someone else do it differently.
The good ones weren’t necessarily the most technically brilliant people in the room. But they found something in the human part of it. In the development conversation, in the moment someone figured out something they’d been stuck on, in building a team that was more than the sum of its parts. That was their reward, not just the outcome of the work itself.
There’s also a version of this that is about us as humans: our identity.
When you’ve built your sense of professional self around being good at what you do, and excelling at individual execution, and most people in tech have and do, then moving into management means giving up a significant amount of the thing you’re known for. You do less of the actual work, your name is on fewer things, your contribution becomes harder to point to, because it’s woven into other people’s output rather than sitting cleanly on your own. You are not the doer, you are the enabler.
That’s a loss of identity. Even if management is the right move, it involves grieving the loss of something, and a shift in the clarity of being the person who does the thing, versus being the person who makes it possible for others to do it.
If you’re in this decision tree, whether to put your hand up for a leadership role, or whether to push back on the assumption that you should, here are the 3 questions I’d suggest you ask yourself.
- Do you find yourself energised by other people’s problems, or drained by them? Not in a “sometimes people are hard” way, in a structural, day-in-day-out way. Because that’s what the job is.
- When someone on your team does something differently than you would, and it works, can you celebrate that as a win? Or does it feel like a small loss?
- Are you drawn to the idea of building a team, or just to the title that comes with it? Because one of those sustains you through the hard days. The other one … doesn’t.
And for everyone who’s looked at this honestly and decided that management isn’t for them: I say Bravo.
The experienced, deep contributor who has been around long enough to know a lot, that person is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable. A career built on going further into your craft, rather than wider into headcount, is a career. It just doesn’t always get marketed that way.
If you’re in an environment where management feels like the only path forward, it might be worth asking whether that’s actually true, or whether it’s the assumption you’ve inherited from the place you’re in. And if it is, then you have a choice … wait, continue to be awesome at what you do and be satisfied, or leave.
You’re allowed to want something different.
Be Awesome. And Nice.