Warning to the “Hands-On” Manager

First-time managers often find themselves in a hybrid position with both new management responsibilities and continued expectation to contribute directly to the team’s work product. We may hear the terms “hands-on” manager or “working” manager to describe these hybrid roles.

If you find yourself in one of these roles – and especially if you’ve chosen one of these roles for yourself – I’d like to offer you a word of caution.

Effective management is a completely different skill set from the technical work you may be used to. This is true even if you have held a technical position with some influence or thought leadership in your organization.

Building relationships with your direct reports, talking about their work, and inspiring their growth are unfamiliar skills. Not only that, they’re also skills for which it’s hard to track your progress and show yourself that you’re doing a good job.

As long as you still have “hands-on” work that directly contributes to your team’s measurable output, you will be strongly tempted to put too much of your effort on that comfortable work and neglect the harder management skills that you’re still not good at yet.

I don’t have a formula or five-step plan to help you resolve this tension. The key is in making the choice to embrace what it means to be in management – to accept that your value to the company is no longer measured primarily by your individual contributions. Instead, avoiding promotion remorse will depend on your ability to embrace your new identity as one who provides value by serving and supporting the other human beings who do the technical work.

In the meantime, you may still officially have hands-on work responsibilities. But the more quickly you can develop your skills with the harder hands-off work, the more quickly your team can absorb the rest of the hands-on work, and the more fulfilled you’ll feel in your new role.

If you’d like help making this change so you can feel more fulfilled and avoid promotion remorse, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to begin the conversation.