The unbearable lightness of being (a manager)

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get together with the entire global marketing team at LinkedIn. My whole team and I hadn't been in the same place together like that in two years, at my first offsite at LinkedIn, about a year into my job. I still remember vividly that mixture of lightness and gravity that hit me all at once when I realized just how many people were relying on me as their boss (!). And this time, when I boarded the bus to head to our first offsite activity this time, all of these feelings rushed right back. Honestly, it took my breath away. I know that sounds too obvious and almost silly, but really, look at that photo. Those are my people. And I am responsible for all of them.

As we spent the next few days together focusing on our work and each other, making the most of the short time to bank connections, memories, and familiarity again, I sat with that lightness and gravity once more. We are surrounded by managers everywhere, but I know very few people who started out in their career with a clear understanding of what it means to manage other people. It simply comes with the territory in many jobs, and we accept and understand it to be a construct of most workplaces and a tangible way to imagine one's career progression. Nowadays, at least there are many more resources (like LinkedIn Learning courses!) for people who want to get better at various aspects of being a people manager. But most of us in my and previous generations of management, I'd argue we learned by watching other people succeed or stumble. Perhaps there is no better way to learn than living through the experience. But if we believe people managers are one of the most important parts of an organization's ability to move well as one, there should be much more explicit conversations about what it means—and more importantly, what it takes to be an effective people manager.

Let's first talk about why the role of people management matters. The idea of management is often aspirational—a manifestation of one's career growth and progression—but the day-to-day conversations about the management work is perhaps less inspirational. You're always in the middle, middle of the work, middle of your team and your boss, middle of decisions that get made above you, and observations that get made below and around you, etc etc. You're pulled into many directions, and it often seems impossible for you to make anyone happy (p.s. I don't believe it is anyone's job—people manager or not—to make someone else happy at work; and that happiness in life is different from fulfillment at work and up to each of us to define and own). And despite all of that, you keep coming back to be in the middle of it because a manager's job is to make the most of the shared and vested interests between your business's goals and objectives, and your team's skills and their career objectives.

How does one, then, make sense of this messy middle? Focus on the work and the people and be the matchmaker. Set a structure and scope for your team that as closely matches your intended strategy designed to meet the business's objectives. If the strategy is a set of ideas and a point-of-view, you need to enable and activate your people around it with a plan, i.e. how the team is organized in their operation and held accountable in goals and milestones. At the same time, as you hire and grow your team, constantly update your understanding and knowledge of their skills—including ones they've got but may not been able to utilized in this job at this company—as well as their career goals. You're not always going to get it right, but the intent is to match the business needs to what your people bring to the table, and what they can also gain from that experience. And remember, this is never a one and done exercise. Organizations and people are not static, which means a big part of the job is to stay alert, aware, and ahead of both business trends as well as people trends.

It's one thing to put the best of your business and people together, but another for you to take the opportunity of your job to let other people learn from how you're doing it. I mentioned how many of us "grew up" into a managerial role by watching other people. Most of those lessons were implicit and subtle (but also visceral at times), as in it took work on my part to pay attention and pull insights from the situation, or sometimes, experiencing what it's like to be on the other end of inexperienced or careless approaches to management. I often thought about what my managers were thinking or learning at the time in their experiences, and wished for opportunities to hear about them. So now, I try to practice it with my own team as appropriate. With my team leads in particular, I often share what I am trying to solve for, how I am thinking about it, which parts I am struggling with, specifically in the work of people management. I invite them to talk about the same in their respective areas. I talk about examples from my past experiences that I wish I had handled better, when there are parallels. Most importantly, I talk about how I feel about these situations and try to assess how they do, too, because management is about people, and people have lots of feelings, and feelings can both get in the way and help us see things more clearly—an important data point. All of this takes trust, because it's not easy admitting I don't know something or I messed up somewhere. I'm lucky to have that in my team, which means I'm comfortable sharing these lessons as they happen, without the safety of the retrospective distance.

All that said, people management is not for everyone. As I've progressed in my career, I can't count the number of heart-to-heart conversations I've had with many of my peers who often lament how much they miss doing the hands on work, and how little of the messy middle that is the work of people management they find rewarding. I am not saying this to judge people. This is an honest and important admission we all need to take measure of because the job is that important, and requires intentional choice and active participation on the part of both the company who makes these opportunities available, and those who take them. Many organizations, unfortunately, conflate career growth and progression with people management. That often translates to assumptions that just because an individual excels at their specific job and skills, that they can naturally hop over to managerial responsibilities without any training done or expectations set. That's how you end up with people with a huge scope who don't know what to do about the people part of it. It also limits the diversity of growth paths that should exist in many workplaces for those who are skilled at their jobs, with or without people management responsibilities.

In his 2012 book "How Will You Measure Your Life?" Clay Christensen wrote "...if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions." It may not be a glamorous job but a serious one. If you understand the meaning and purpose of this role and dedicate the necessary time and effort to do right by the business and your people, there is nothing more rewarding and honorable. You'll get to see the results of your investment in the management part of your job translate to things like how much more effectively your team is working together and delivering impact, how certain individuals or teams grow in their skills and capabilities, and how resilient you are as a team through the good and some tougher times. What's more, you will get to see people bloom in their careers well beyond your time together in your current place of employment. The lightness you feel when you get to be a part of someone's life like that, and the gravity of the knowledge that you played a small role in it, are both dizzying and worth carrying.