Nobody Tells You Becoming a Manager Is a Loss

Nobody tells you that becoming a manager is a loss.

They tell you it's a promotion. Recognition. Someone looked at your work and decided you were ready for more. What they don't tell you is that you are also being asked to stop being the person you spent years becoming.

I asked for it, but I was not ready

Maybe some people are born leaders. I was not.

I'm autistic, and people were hugely opaque to me. I noticed that people liked to laugh. People on sitcoms laughed. So from an early age I mimicked what I saw on TV. If you think sitcom gags are funny in real life, I encourage you to try it yourself. It will be a short experiment, and a few people will be upset with you.

Early in my career, at Boeing, fresh out of graduate school, I wanted to be a manager. I was full of piss and vinegar. Why not me? I was smart. I was motivated. And it was a way to move my career forward. I kept pestering my manager until he finally relented and let me into Boeing's introductory program for managers. I was the charity case. Looking back, I was way (way!) over my skis.

I needed another decade of bake time. This was Dunning-Kruger in person: I had no idea how little I knew about people, let alone about managing them, or, heaven forbid, leading them. My ignorance had company, and its name was hubris.

Worse, I thought I had a shortcut. I understood systems. Computers are deterministic systems made of silicon. People are non-deterministic systems made of carbon. Surely I could map one onto the other. I was sure I'd found my Rosetta Stone. I hadn't. It took another decade before I began to understand myself, then others, and finally our shared humanity. That search is where the book began.

Look at my reasons. Smart. Motivated. Moving forward. Every one of them was about what the job would do for me. None was about what it would ask of me. I didn't yet know that the job was to give up the thing I was good at.

Your fingerprints come off the work

The individual contributor (IC) identity is built on craft. A problem solved cleanly. A system designed well. A thing shipped that works. Things you touched. Things you thought long about. Each one has a direct lineage and linkage to who you are.

It is also built on a short feedback loop. Your work is visible. Within days you know whether you did it well. That loop tells you who you are. It took years to earn, and it is real.

The day you step into leadership, that loop breaks. The work still matters, but it is no longer yours. It belongs to the people you now serve. Your job is to make them good at the thing you used to do yourself. Your fingerprints come off the work. The credit goes to someone else. The loop stretches from days to months to years, and if you count mentoring, decades.

That is a loss. We should call it one. You will need to grieve it. And like any grief, it comes in phases, from denial and anger to, finally, acceptance.

Micromanagement is unfinished grief

Most new managers don't fail from a lack of skill. They fail from unfinished grief.

They never fully let go of who they were. They keep one hand on the work. They review too closely. They rewrite what didn't need rewriting. They solve problems their team could have solved. They stay close to the craft, because the craft is where they know who they are.

Their team calls this micromanagement. The manager calls it diligence. Both are right, and the gap between them is where trust breaks.

From the inside it doesn't feel like control. It feels like caring. It feels like holding on to the last place where you were sure you were good. That is why "delegate more" rarely works. It treats a grief problem like a skills problem. The person knows how to delegate. What they can't do yet is let go.

But grief isn't the whole of it. Micromanagement is also a failure of trust, and underneath that failure is insecurity.

You were used to being the expert. Now you've been promoted into your temporary level of incompetence. Everyone around you is more competent in their role as an IC than you are in yours as a manager. And of course they are. They have years, or decades, in that role. You? Mere days.

You have to learn all over again. And your ability to peer into your own ignorance is where your leadership will spring from. It's the corner of the fate box where you don't know what you don't know, and it's where all great growth, and innovation, begins. To master leading others, you will need to master leading yourself. (Maslow's hierarchy has a lot to say about that, and so will the book.) You will need to be self-aware, and self-actualized, as a manager if you want others to be the same.

In this period of temporary incompetence, you will likely feel insecure. And what does any reasonable person do then? They seek out terra firma, solid bedrock. For you, in that moment, that means going back to being an IC, where you have years, or decades, of experience. But that is not your role anymore. Your contribution is no longer what you contribute. It is getting others to contribute. And so you fail, until you learn to surrender through delegation.

Now the agents are doing it to everyone

For most of my career, this was a change a person faced once, maybe twice.

That is changing. AI is turning individual contributors into people who direct agents. The engineer who wrote every line now describes the what and the why, and something else does the how. The fingerprints come off the work in exactly the way they do for a new manager. "What did I make today?" gets harder to answer.

In my experience, the people doing best with agents are the ones who've already led teams. They work backward from the what, and they know how to define what "good" looks like, in objective, verifiable terms. Others fuss over how an agent wrote a few lines of code, or just say "build me this" with no plan for what to build first and how they'll know it worked. I wrote about the widening gap between new and experienced engineers in Wisdom Can Be Learned, Not Taught.

A lot of people are about to feel this loss without anyone naming it. Some will review every line the agent writes and rewrite what didn't need rewriting. That is the same unfinished grief, pointed at a machine.

How can we set our director up to succeed?

The change for me wasn't a decision. It happened slowly, through enough time with enough people that my old reasons stopped making sense. I stopped asking "How do I become a leader?" and started asking "What do the people around me need, and can I give it to them?"

Reece, a dear friend and colleague, once punched me in the proverbial mouth when he shared how he thought about our then director. He said, "How can we help set them up to be successful?" It shook me to the core. He was not talking about a subordinate or a direct report. He was talking about our director. It may be the singular day I can point to when I finally understood, deeply, in my bones, the concept of servant leadership. The question for a leader is not just where are we going, and not just how can I help someone who reports to me, but how do I ensure everyone around me, regardless of who reports to whom, is successful.

It is a day that stays with me, because it brought, and still brings, so much clarity when I get lost in the grind of the job. I always come back to that question. It's the question that asks us to accept ego-death, stop focusing on ourselves, and find the courage to serve others. And by serving, we might then have the chance to lead.

"How do I become a leader?" is a question about getting. "What do the people around me need?" is about serving. When I started solving the problems of the people around me, my career as a people leader took off. People follow leaders who are trying to serve them. Past what the org chart requires, they follow no one else.

The craft becomes your judgment

The change is never fully complete, and that's fine. The craft doesn't vanish. It becomes the ground your judgment stands on. The IC you were is the one who knows enough to ask the right question, not the one who stays up all night to answer it.

And find your people. The best teammates anyone who leads can have are other people leaders. They are intimately aware of the duties of your job, and are often the most sympathetic to the toll and toil of the work when done well.

For founders promoting your best engineer: the first work of a new manager is internal. Give them room to grieve. Don't mistake the hand they keep on the work for strength.

For the new manager: what are you still holding on to, and who would you be if you set it down?