Should I Go Into Management?
I frequently get asked how I got into management and whether I made the right choice or not. How I answer the first question is very specific to me and my strengths. How you answer the second question will depend entirely on who you are and what you are looking for in a job and a career. As early as my undergraduate degree in college, I knew I wanted to go into management—not because I wanted to climb the corporate ladder—but because I was excited about working with people. One of my passions is career planning and development and I love that my job mixes that with my responsibilities for designing systems and products that are used in real life. Both take creativity, hard work, and patience, but can have a lasting impact in people’s lives.
If you’re thinking about pursuing a management career path, it’s helpful to reflect on what energizes you in your current roles. I’ll go through a few signs that may indicate that management is a good fit, as well as a few signs that you may be better off as an individual contributor.
Signs You May be a Good Fit for Management
You Enjoy Working with People
When I declared my major to be mechanical engineering at the start of my college career, I did so with more than a little trepidation. The closest thing I had to an engineering role model was my Grandpa. He started out as a civil engineer doing city planning and ended up as a sales engineer for a waste management company. The family was proud to know that Grandpa even had a patent or two for the work he did over the years, but aside from this exposure, I had no idea what engineers did on a day to day basis. I wasn’t confident that my math and science would be cut out for an engineering career, but I liked the idea of creating something from nothing. Because of my hesitation on the STEM side of this career path, I decided that long term, I would play to my strengths and get an MBA to go into management.
My path had a few twists and turns along the way and deviated from my original plan as a wide-eyed freshman on campus, but I did end up going into management. It turns out that my natural strengths do line up more on the softer side of the spectrum—despite proving myself in the hard sciences as well. I was good at my job as a design engineer but my impact is magnified when I work with people.
If you feel yourself gravitating in group settings to someone who can help direct a team, resolve conflict between individuals, or plan the efforts of multiple people to meet a goal, that may indicate you are a strong collaborator. If you find yourself excited about counseling friends or family members on their next career step you may be a strong coach and mentor. All of those are skills used on a daily basis by managers.
If you’re a student, you may be asking yourself, “What does it mean if I hate group projects?” If that is the case, it means you’re human and likely are doing a disproportionate amount of work. A sense of ownership over your projects could be an entire section on fitness for management itself so don’t overlook that. However, school also tends to be a poor representation of work in a professional setting. Don’t count out a role in management based on a bad experience with a small group. When you find a good organization with people who care about their jobs, that group experience will be infinitely better.
You Enjoy Planning
Do you enjoy looking ahead? Are you fascinated with what’s around the corner and how to get there? Do you like to plan out your own work to make sure it gets done well and on-time. These are all skills that will be invaluable to a manager who does the same things at a macro scale for their team. Good managers know how to predict road blocks before they happen and she will put in place contingency plans to smooth them out and keep the project moving forward.
Be careful to not mistake daydreaming for planning. You may be constantly looking to the future and you may help people get excited about what could be. However, planning is putting together concrete actions that will help that future become reality. If there’s no action or definition involved, then you may be a daydreamer. Combine that with a healthy dose of reality and harness that creativity to make that dream become reality!
You Enjoy Organization
“like a conductor in front of an orchestra, you are working to guide different musicians to play in rhythm and harmony with each other”
This may be the most indirect transfer of skill and one that manifests in different ways—I know a few effective leaders who are very disorganized in traditional ways—a messy desk, always losing their keys, etc. But much of what you do as a manager is organize the efforts of multiple people to achieve a common goal. Much like a conductor in front of an orchestra, you are working to guide different musicians to play in rhythm and harmony with each other. If the timing or the pitch is off, the symphony will never have the resonance or emotional impact that it could with the audience.
In business, you may be able to make some semblance of progress with individuals working on their own to reach a goal. But a good manager knows the skills and strengths of each member of their team and will organize their efforts to be maximum effect when combined with the overall organization. An effective manager is able to make a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. If you enjoy organizing the work of those around you, you’re already exercising skills needed in management.
You Find Ways to Expand Your Reach
Oftentimes, people are promoted to manager because they are achieving good results. However, a better indicator of successful management skills is the ability to expand the capacity of the people and organization around you to achieve the same results you are. Being able to write code doesn’t guarantee that you’ll manage other coders well. However, if you a coder who can uncover the workflow patterns of yourself and those around you and establish a best practice to elevate the quality of code for the entire group, you are much more likely to be a successful manager. The ability to expand the impact of one individual to lift up the entire team is a hallmark of a good manager.
Signs You May be Better Off as an Individual Contributor
You Don't Enjoy Working with Others
If you don’t already know how you fall on the working-with-people spectrum, take a second to review your inner dialogue. If you think about dealing with your boss or handling other members of your team, or find yourself internally rolling your eyes any time you have to work with someone other than yours truly in order to get your work done, that may be your first clue that working with people is not your strong suit.
While you will likely have to work with people in some capacity for almost any job you do, you’re going to spend the majority of your time as a manger meeting with people. You’ll be counseling with team members, negotiating with your peers, and pitching projects and ideas to your leadership. If all of that people time grates on you, management may not be your thing.
You Have a Hard Time Seeing Beyond Your Own Work
If you like to keep your head down, put the blinders on, and work, you can be an incredibly productive team member. If you can’t be bothered to think about how your work fits in the context of the rest of the team or the organization you may end up making a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the picture. As long as you have a good manager to work with you and give you the right guidance, this can work out just fine. But it likely means you don’t have a natural tendency towards planning and foresight that are hugely consequential as a manager.
Managers have to keep their heads up and have a 30,000 foot view of the project around them. One of their key functions is to look ahead and remove obstacles out of the team’s way. If you would rather focus only on your own work, you may struggle trying to help your team be as effective as possible.
You Get the Most Fulfillment from the Individual Tasks of Your Role
Many mechanical engineers would rather spend their time working through a complex stress analysis or force balance than have to deal with the administrative tasks that often fall to a manager. If you’re a mechanical engineer that can’t imagine giving up the mechanism design, the intricate CAD work, or the FEA analysis, there’s nothing wrong with that. The fact is, if you move into management, your time will be focused on other tasks and that won’t be a critical part of your role anymore. Knowing what you enjoy most about your role is a good indicator of what you would enjoy in a future management position.
You Just Want More Money
Making a transition into management simply because you want more money is not a good reason. It’s likely true that you may be able to get a promotion and a healthy raise by transitioning into management but if you don’t have a passion for people, planning, organization, and other types of described in this article, you’ll likely end up resenting your new position and not succeeding at it either. This is a sure way to preserve the cliche that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. In other words, you may get promoted but you’ll end up in a position where you can’t go any further because you haven’t honed the skills **needed to progress. You won’t grow if you don’t care, and you won’t get more of that money you were looking for in the first place.
You’ll Know When You Manage
The only way you’ll know for sure if you enjoy management responsibilities is by taking them on as part of your role. That can mean assuming a full-time management position, or it could mean taking on a project where you act as a functional manager. The latter option is great preparation for a formal transition but likely won’t include all the responsibilities and tasks included in a formal role. Regardless, both will give you a taste for what it’s like to be a manager and there’s no better way to find out if you enjoy the work than just doing it.
You Can Always Go Back
Many people are hesitant to make the jump into a management position because it feels like an irreversible career change. The good news is that this is a myth. There is always the option of going back into an individual contributor role if you try out management for a while and realize it’s not for you. It’s better for you, your career, and those you work with if you pick the path that best matches your strengths. By definition, not everyone can be a manager and you can have a successful career as a team member that delivers invaluable work.
Not Managing is Not Failure
It’s important to recognize that not managing does not mean you are a failure. It’s worse to be in a management position that you don’t enjoy and possibly aren’t very good at because now your personal dissatisfaction and professional amateurism will affect so much more than just yourself. The potent danger of management positions is that someone inexperienced or unhappy can impact a broad pool of employees around them—even outside their own team—to sow discontent, drive inefficiencies, and, bring down morale.
If you try out a project or even an official management role and truly find that you don’t enjoy it that’s not failure—that’s being honest with yourself and playing to your strengths. You’ll be better off in the long run with a role that you truly enjoy.
One word of caution: don’t mistake the difficulty of the role for a lack of ability on your part. Moving into management will put you into uncharted territory. It may feel like you’re exploring and discovering the tools to navigate your way through the unknown as you go. Even MBA graduates won’t know everything they need to succeed right away. Don’t give up. You may feel like an imposter at first, but that likely just means you’re on the learning curve. Stick with it and you may find yourself coming up that curve quickly and ready to knock it out of the park sooner than you expect.
Not all Leaders are Managers (and Vice Versa)
In every organization there are leaders. Individuals who have a profound on the impact of the business and the colleagues they work with. They may be a great technical architect, a mentor, a coach, a visionary, or one of many other roles. Many of these leaders won’t have anything related to management in their titles. They lead be example and because of their expertise in their field. Leadership is completely separate from management and some of the best leaders in any field don’t manage a single person.
Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Having a manager title does not magically make you into a leader. There are plenty of uninspiring managers out there. The good thing is that leadership skills are just that. They are skills that can be learned and you can start practicing right now, in whatever role you currently have. Some people may have a more natural affinity for it than others, but with time, practice, and coaching, it can be learned. If you enjoy the management responsibilities but aren’t confident in your abilities to lead, invest in yourself, look for a mentor, and start practicing leadership skills now.
