Everything you should know when you become a manager of managers
Moving from being a manager of individuals to managing managers is a huge step, and probably one of the biggest changes you’ll make in your career. Remember that you have one great asset going for you: You’ve already been successful as a manager, which provides a foundation that will be super useful in your new role!
This article will help you understand what to expect and prepare for when you move to managing managers, and how to adapt your mindset. In the second part of this series, you’ll find a practical guide to succeeding in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers.
What to expect when you start managing managers
What you know & how you obtain information changes
Your context changes, your job is now to look up and around the organisation. You need to look “up” and “around” at senior leadership, your peers, and other departments, at least as much (likely even more!) than “down” at the teams reporting to you.
Your level of insight increases. You hear more sensitive information, and you will likely have to figure out how transparent you can be.
More actively “pushing” and “pulling” information will become important. You’ll need to “push” context, updates, and information to your boss and stakeholders, and “pull” information from the broader business to make sure you get the context you need.
What you do changes
Management will take up all of your time. You’re a full-time manager now.
Your responsibility will shift from “helping a team succeed”, to “owning business results for a domain”.
You’ll operate much more independently with less clear constraints and boundaries, and more ambiguity. Depending on the size of your organisation, you may need to define your own job.
The way you spend your time will shift significantly. You’ll likely be in even more meetings, which will have very different contents.
Strategic and highly ambiguous work will be your focus, since you’ll work at a much higher level.
You’ll become the interface between your teams and the broader organisation. This involves being a translator, soliciting and passing on requirements and feedback in both directions.
Creating a good work environment for a set of teams will be a big part of your job. This means leading by example, supporting the managers reporting to you, and actively working with your peers and leaders across the company.
You’ll move from building teams, to building systems and organisations. Similarly to when you’d work on software architecture, you’ll start looking at your teams and organisation, interactions, interfaces, and optimise for the whole.
Actively working against becoming a bottleneck and learning to delegate will become critical. This is true for any manager, but managers of managers are especially at risk. A lot of work will end up on your plate, much more than you can handle. Your delegation skills will be a huge factor in whether you’ll succeed in this role.
Leading by example will become essential. The people around you will notice the way that you show up in meetings, conversations, and presentations.
You will have more meetings than you ever did before, and you will need to manage your calendar very actively.
Time to think will be scarce, and you’ll need to make sure you get this time, otherwise you’ll likely get bogged down in tactical work and have a really hard time working at a strategic level.
You will likely need to onboard yourself. Expect to run most of your onboarding yourself.
Who you work with changes
There will be many more moving pieces that need to be factored into your actions and decisions: Your boss, stakeholders for your domain, as well as several other departments need to be heard and considered.
Your primary team is now your peers. They’re your go-to if you need a second opinion, someone to collaborate with, or a space to vent. You will likely also be expected to own and run larger initiatives in collaboration with them.
Your relationship with your boss changes
As your boss changes to someone at a higher level, they will likely not have a lot of time for you. You will need to take charge of managing the relationship with them. If you’re in a fast-growing company, your boss may be new to this themselves, so their ability to offer a lot of support may be limited.
Your growth and development will be up to you. Structured development programmes for managers of managers are rare (but I can help you there!), and many companies expect that people at your level are experienced enough to take charge of their own development.
“Success” measures change
You’ll no longer be the expert. Now you work with people who are much better (technically) than you are, your focus shifts to ensuring that your domain has the right experts in place.
“It isn’t how much you know that matters. What matters is how much access you have to what other people know. It isn’t just how intelligent your team members are; it is how much of that intelligence you can draw out and put to use. ”
Prepare to adjust what “success” at work means for you. You may not feel like you’re actually making progress or getting anything done at first. This is normal and something most people go through.
A lot of your work will take a long time to be “finished”. The results and projects that you own will be very ambiguous and take a long time to turn into concrete results. You’ll need to learn to be okay with that.
How you feel about your job may change
Your decisions and the impact of your decisions will change. You will likely have to make decisions that you don’t enjoy. You will not be able to make everyone happy, and that’s not your job. With any decision you make, you will have to optimise for the good of the broader organisation. This can mean, for example, that you will have to draw hard lines on making exceptions for individuals on policies because of the precedent it would set.
Communicating and selling will become a big part of your job. You will have to contextualise, explain, and sell a variety of decisions to a large group of people with a broad variety of perspectives and roles. Many of these decisions will not be your own, and there will be decisions that you have to convey that you disagree with.
You may feel lonely more often than you did previously.
How you lead changes
Leading through influence will become critical to being effective because you need to partner with and influence a much larger and more diverse group of stakeholders. Your job is to get feedback and information to the right people, in a way that will most likely land well and lead to the desired outcomes.
You’ll move from coaching individuals, to coaching coaches. Your job isn’t to coach people directly anymore, but to help your direct reports become better coaches for their teams: You help them think differently, level up their skills, and problem-solve on their own.
Balancing alignment and autonomy and holding people accountable will become a critical part of your job. The managers that you manage will need autonomy, and you will need to work out how to balance this with holding them accountable to results.
Finding new ways to test the waters and gather intelligence will become part of making decisions. Building trust with the managers reporting to you will go a long way.
Moving into the role of managing managers was one of the most exciting changes in my career, and I find that this work can be incredibly rewarding. It is a new and different role, but remember everything you learned as a manager already, and know that you’ve got this. In the second part of this series, you’ll find a practical guide to succeeding in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers. And if you’d like to work with someone who’s been through this herself and coached many managers during their transition to higher-level roles, contact me to set up an introduction.
