Meet Steve.
A software engineer with 7 years of experience, Steve loves Stars Wars. Loathes the prequels though. And who can blame him? Steve has a wife, Karla, who’s a product manager for a rival software company. Steve and Karla live in a sleepy suburb with their dog, Dooku. Ironic, isn’t it? That these lifelong Star Wars fans named their beloved German Shephard after a character from one of the repudiated prequels.
Well…
Anyway, Steve and Karla have a pretty good life together. They’re talking about starting their own family. They even have a list of baby names. Now, Steve and Karla may be Star Wars fans, but they aren’t fanatics. None of the character names from the mythology are on their baby name list, not even Grogu. Thanks in advance, say to them, their firstborn child will.
Surprise!
Steve got promoted to manager. His new mission is to lead a team of five software engineers. Steve is eager to embrace his new role. As he should be. He enjoys a good challenge. Like when Luke Skywalker took out the Death Star. But Luke had the Force on his side. As for Steve, well, he’s got a bunch of surprises waiting for him.
New engineering managers, as I’ve pointed out here and here and here, are unprepared for leadership roles. Nobody provides a people management training manual. Surprises are common, leading to frustrations. Fear not. New managers need not succumb to the dark side of their frustrations.
Saddle up.
We’re riding down the dusty, atomic trail to Roswell, New Mexico, best known as the site where a UFO, perhaps an extraterrestrial spacecraft, crashed in 1947. Today, the space cowboy rodeo is back in town. Check out that green cowboy riding the bucking bronco. No matter how hard the horse tries to toss our ET rider out of the saddle, our space cowboy is still holding on to his cowboy hat. If he does get thrown off the horse by surprise, he’s going to rise again and again and again, learning a new lesson from each fall.
So are you, new manager!
Let’s look at 10 surprises for new engineering managers, including tips for dealing with the unexpected.
1. Politickle Me Elmo – Politics are real
No politics on this job. Nope. Never. Reality check. Politics are a part of every organization. As a manager, you have to navigate organizational politics. People will try to use you and your team to achieve their end, contrary to the best interests of your team or greater organizational goals. For example, did another manager compliment one of your direct reports in a mass email to recognize an individual accomplishment? Or did the manager use the complimentary email as a tactic to convince your top performer to join their own team? Getting blindsided by organizational politics is not only frustrating, but hurts on a personal level, leading to self-doubt and distrust. You can’t succeed when you don’t believe in yourself or your colleagues.
Tip: Prioritize the development of your people skills immediately after your promotion to manager. Build alliances across teams. Build relationships with your manager peers. Building these bridges helps to establish trust. As you work on these relationships, you’ll also discover who can’t be trusted. That’s unfortunate, but reality. Yeah. Yoda should have maintained his 1:1s with Senator Palpatine.
2. Hire We Go Again – Hiring is hard
Need a new head count? Post job online, interview candidates, make offer and onboard new hire. Simple. Right? Except hiring is not easy. Depending on the size of the company, hiring can be quite complicated, slowed down by policies and procedures. Applicant tracking systems can be bogged down by complicated workflows, slowing down administrative tasks. Screening and interviewing candidates is laborious. You finally identify a top candidate. Oops. They turn down your offer. Oh, and let’s not forget: All of those hiring activities consume your time, making it challenging to keep up with the pile of work on your already overloaded plate.
Tip: Organize your hiring workflow by writing up a hiring playbook for you and your interview team. Block off time on your calendar to focus on hiring-related tasks. Learn how to optimize usage of that suboptimal ATS. Use Copilot or ChatGPT as a tool to help screen the influx of resumes. Most important of all, drive the hiring process, keeping things moving forward with your recruiting partner and the interview team until you have a person in the seat.
3. Accolades and Gravy – Lack of recognition
Your team is super productive. As their manager, you keep their projects moving to completion. You resolve conflicts. You take action on your team’s concerns. You coach team members through difficult problems. Because you attend endless meetings during the day, you spend some of your evenings or weekends getting caught up on a backlog of administrative tasks. Job well done! Except nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Even your own boss doesn’t recognize your efforts. You begin to wonder: Did I make the right career move by becoming a manager?
Tip: Focus on the outcome of your efforts. Your team delivered. You achieved results. You did your job. You got paid. Does it hurt when you fail to get recognized for your efforts? Yes. Instead of dwelling on disappointment, take your accomplishments to the table at performance review time. Showcase your team’s impact to make a strong case for higher rewards for yourself and your team.
4. Middler than Thou – Caught in the middle
You’re a manager now, which means you have the autonomy to make big decisions and formulate strategy and set goals and — not really. What? But you’re a boss now! Yes, a boss who’s sandwiched between their boss and their own direct reports. You have this vision for your team, but your leadership team has a different vision. You find yourself making compromises, often to the protests of your direct reports, to maintain alignment with your leadership. You’ve planned out your team’s work for the quarter, but your boss drops a new project on your plate. If your team feels overloaded, expect to hear their complaints. If your team isn’t delivering, expect your boss to question you. Feel the squeeze? The jaws of a vise are unforgiving.
Tip: Develop a strong partnership with your leadership team. Leverage your partnership to influence your leadership to be receptive to your own vision. Embrace your role as the bridge between your team and the leadership team. Use your influence to advocate for your team. And may Obi-Wan strike me down for my usage of the buzzword “leverage”!
5. Baggage is the Beast – Past is always present
Experienced leaders remember that magical moment after their promotion to manager. Brimming with optimism, the newly promoted manager is determined to use their new boss powers to bring about positive changes. We’re gonna fix All The Things! In reality, baggage from years past — inefficiencies, broken processes, internal politics and tech debt — gradually diminish that sense of purpose, leading to a feeling of frustration. The past lives in the present and impedes progress.
Tip: Slow down. Contain your idealism. Assess the pile of baggage. Tackle small problems to make incremental changes. As you solve the smaller problems, you’ll start building the influence needed to tackle the larger, lingering problems of the past.
6. Rudolph the Red Tape Reindeer – Bureaucracy is a brick wall
Remember the good old days as an individual contributor? Your laptop died. Your boss procured a new laptop for you. Problem solved. Flash forward to the present. Your direct report’s laptop dies. You need to procure the replacement. Simple? Right? Just send an email somewhere and the new laptop will magically appear. Wrong. See, you have to follow the official hardware procurement procedure, which involves navigating some counterintuitive UI. Eventually, you file the procurement request, but it gets rejected. Oops. You forgot to select the official hardware spec for your department. Okay, so you re-select the correct hardware spec. Problem solved, except it’s not because you need an approval just to update the hardware spec! But you don’t know who to contact for the approval so you spend even more time fishing around to find the right approver. Bingo! You found the right person, except you didn’t because it turns out that person just transferred to another department. Not to worry! The former approver refers you to their replacement. Cool. We’re getting somewhere, except we’re not because the new approver is on vacation. Guess what? Not only do you need the vacationing employee’s approval, but you’re gonna need at least two more approvals before the procurement request can move forward. Wow. This is turning into a separate blog post, proving that bureaucracy can be mightier than a brick wall.
Tip: Learn how to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth in your company. Be patient though. Many missteps may be required before you find the path forward. Be persistent in your quest to break through the wall, keeping on top of requests and nudging people. As you navigate the maze, develop relationships across departments with people who can guide you on future quests. Remember: No two journeys are the same through the bureaucratic labyrinth. Also, rely on your sense of humor to cope with the frustrations of bureaucracy.
7. Cloudy with a Chance of Clarity – Miscommunication is common
One of the biggest surprises for new managers is the prevalence of miscommunication in the workplace. Your exposure to miscommunication will increase a hundredfold in your new role. You’ll ask people questions, but they won’t answer your questions. Instead of direct answers, expect lengthy asides or tangential responses. Requests will be made of your team with no due date or expectations. Or context. That’s a big one. People will bring up topics of discussion with no context, leaving you wondering about the purpose of the discussion. Changes to production will be made without informing stakeholders, catching people by surprise and causing outages. Leaders will be misaligned on project goals because they haven’t been communicating with each other.
Tip: Learn the power of the clarifying question. Assert yourself to ask those clarifying questions. Look for opportunities to improve team miscommunication. Be clear and direct with your own communication. Build alliances with leaders across teams to maintain an open line of communication. While you can’t change how others communicate, you can learn how to adapt and overcome the shortcomings of their communication style.
8. Agend-uh Oh! – Meetings are aplenty
Say goodbye to coding, new engineering manager. You’re gonna be spending a lot — maybe most — of your time attending meetings. Long meetings. Short meetings. Short meetings that feel like long meetings. Productive meetings. Useless meetings. And irrelevant meetings in which the thought bubble above your head sighs and says, “Why did they even invite me to this thing? I have nothing to contribute!” At the end of some days, a plethora of meetings will leave you feeling drained.
Tip: Take the time to assess the quality of the meetings on your calendar. Adjust your meeting schedule to accept invitations to relevant, actionable meetings. Decline irrelevant meetings. Avoid scheduling meetings for items that can be communicated through documents or emails, like status updates. Like, nobody really wants to sit through an hour of status updates unless the goal of the meeting is to produce actionable outcomes.
9. Journey to Unknownstahn – No answers
Look at you. You’re a newly promoted manager. That means you graduated first in your class at the Jedi Academy. As a Jedi Master, you have all of the answers. Okay. Reality check. You’re not a Jedi Master. You’re a manager now. You won’t have all of the answers, but people will think you do, particularly your direct reports. You may get questioned about things like company strategy or decisions made by senior leaders. You care about your team. You want to answer their questions, but sometimes, you won’t have any answers. Even more frustrating? You take your team’s questions to someone else in the org and you end up with the same results. No answers!
Tip: Be honest with your team. You don’t know what you don’t know. Nobody wants to come across as ineffective in their manager role, but you have to resist the urge to answer in corporate babble speak for the sake of keeping up appearances. Better to be honest about your lack of knowledge than to make vague, worthless statements.
10. Use the Fork, Luke – Managing people is hard
You made it to the tenth surprise on the list. Still wanna be a manager of people? Maybe it won’t be a surprise, but managing people is hard work. People don’t always listen. People say yes to your proposal, but still do their own thing. You provide documentation, but people don’t read it. People have conflicts with each other, sometimes over trivial matters. People zone out during your meetings. Luke had the Force. You have the idiom: Stick a fork in me! Some days, you’re gonna feel like you’re done as a people manager.
Tip: Refer to tip #1. Develop your people skills, focusing on areas like communication, conflict management and relationship-building. Patience is another important skill for your people manager toolbox. Also, prioritize your own well-being. Some days are gonna take a toll on you. Remember to take care of yourself.