Thread by @imightbemary

Every so often I see a Twitter thread where a new manager asks for advice, and inevitably, someone in the comments below says something to the effect of, "hire awesome people, listen to them and get out of their way"

Let me tell ya, this is not advice. It's wishful thinking

This advice has its roots in the servant leadership philosophy, which holds that a leader’s primary job is to help their people be great at what they do.

I’m not sure how it got introduced to the tech world, but I suspect it is in large part a reaction to the fact that tech leaders often have no idea what they’re doing.

And to be clear, I generally like this philosophy and find it rewarding to manage this way. But it’s not the whole story of people management, and IMO this advice so frequently given because people wish it was how things worked.

The advice that you need to simply stay out of people’s way assumes those people always have the skills, maturity and organizational context to make the right choice for themselves and the company. This is a BIG assumption.

It is your job as a manager to help them get there, but that sometimes means telling them no—that a project they’re excited about is a deadend, that their ideas need more work before they’re ready for primetime, that they actually don’t know better than some coworker they resent

There are times when you need DO need to get in your direct’s way. It may not come naturally to you, but telling people what to do is part of being a manager. It may even be in the IC's best interest, even if it means siding with the company or a stakeholder over them.

Teams and companies are more than the sum of their parts, and managers need to learn to think about how the people they manage fit together and into the company as a whole. This sometimes requires prioritizing the group over the individual, and this can be uncomfortable.

It is especially uncomfortable as a new manager, because the experience of being an IC is still fresh in your mind, visceral. You don't know how to assess your own managerial ability, so you fall back to easiest measurement proxy--how do much do my ICs like me?

Part of what makes people management such a difficult and emotionally draining experience is that you have to stop caring about this. It'd be a lot more fun if all you had to do was cheer on great people, but even great people will lose their way on occasion

When that happens, it's your job to get them back on track. The empathetic mindset of servant leadership helps you build the trust you need to tell them things they might be resistant to, but it doesn't change the fact that you still need to be honest with them.

If you manage people long enough, you WILL find yourself in this situation. You'll go through it many times, in fact, and you will get better at it the more you deal with it.

So yes, listen to your people and be their advocates. But also be prepared to act like an authority figure sometimes, because you are one.