When you move from managing a single team to managing leaders of multiple teams, it’s easy to continue to feel the responsibility for each team’s success. This is especially true if you used to be the direct manager for one of those teams.
And while, yes, you are ultimately responsible for their success, the way you think about your role needs to change. It can be tempting to want to monitor team metrics: their output, their throughput, their defects.
But just like you had to let go of the role of producing when you moved from individual contributor to manager, you now have to let go of some of those team management specifics when you start to manage managers instead of individual contributors.
But if you’re still somewhat responsible for their success, what can you look for?
From your perspective higher in the organization, you’ll need to depend more on the lagging indicators, such as whether the teams are meeting commitments and whether their internal and external customers are satisfied with their work. Trust the managers of those teams to pay attention to the leading indicators. If you need to intervene, use a coaching approach to ask managers about the leading indicators and their relation to the outcomes you want to see.
And if you’d like to explore your specific situation further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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