Balancing Hands-On Contribution and Active Management

I don't really believe in management. Or, not so dramatically, I don't really believe in 'manager' as a noun. 'Manage' as a verb I'm good with. And the hard lines that some industries draw between management and contribution does a disservice to everyone on both sides of that dichotomy.

But to step back a bit. I think of myself as a software developer. When I wake up in the morning and stare into the bathroom mirror that's what I see looking back at me. That's my core skill and what I anchor to - the vertical bar in my skill 'T' so to speak. Realistically I don't get to do a ton of that most weeks, but I always do some kind of hands-on development work (my goal is to spend ~20% of my time in VS Code, Xcode or hacking a shell script doing something useful). All the other skills that I have, be it account management, project execution, software architecture, sales pursuits or whatever, have come from a need to grow into those areas so that I and / or the people around me have fulfilling work to do. I do find those areas interesting (ask me about weighting a sales pipeline sometime) but there's always some kind of connection back to where I have depth. Putting together a business case for a technology-centric IT program I can do. Putting together the business case to build a shopping mall, I'm definitely not your person.

It's been a trip. Most of my career has been in consulting firms, and when I was coming up management responsibilities were incrementally added to your job over time (run the team, run the project, look after the account, look after a bunch of accounts, run the practice etc). There was at least an implicit expectation that you would, over time, pull yourself out the details and get down to the serious business of status reporting, managing those pesky risks and issues and looking gravely at traffic light slides and agreeing that the situation is concerning. I've done all of that, and did it at least well enough to keep moving up the ladder, but I never stopped being hands-on. I want to be able to contribute to a conversation about benefits measurement, or what the future state business process ought to be (in light of what is going on in the industry or the organizational imperatives etc), and then I want to be able to pick up a ticket and fix a software defect. Probably not on the critical path, but contributing nonetheless

And I don't see these as incompatible at all. If I've learnt one thing about management (the noun) is that you can't manage (the verb) something that you don't understand. I've seen what happens when managers, so abstracted from the work and not anchored to any discipline, try to manage something that they can't relate to. It's not pretty and it ends badly. You need to have some kind of depth that leads you back into the details otherwise it's impossible to assess what is important. I've been part of those conversations where you realize the folks responsible for something have no real understanding of what is going on. Maybe others can live with that discomfort but I can't. And the best managers that I've worked for have been the same - they don't shy away from the details as they understand that without those details then the whole isn't going to come together.

So the balance I've reached is that for me to be good, or at least sufficient, at what I do I've got to get into enough details to be relevant. But I can't get so distracted by details that I miss the bigger picture. I need to continue to nurture every part of my skillset, and build the connections between my vertical and my horizontal. I manage - as a verb - but I also believe that if I get good processes and expectations in place then that management ought to be lightweight and becomes by exception over time. On a good day I can live up to this, and I try to have more good days than bad.

The advice that I'd give anyone who is at that fork in the road where they are being told that they need to be a manager and that the contribution work is behind them - and has an inkling of doubt it - is that yes you can (and should) be both. Knowing what is going on and making a positive hands-on contribution will make you a better active manager. Management is a skill but building that skill isn't to the exclusion of anything else.