10 Things to Understand Before You Take a Job in Management

When your team goes to happy hour and complains about “them,” they now mean you.

It’s been said that the transition from individual contributor to manager isn’t just a promotion but a whole career change. I think that’s the right way to frame it. Once you take that leap, the nature of what you do each day shifts.

If you’re aspiring to go into management, be sure you understand these 10 ways your job is about to change:

1. Your Team’s Performance Is Now Your Performance

Your work will now be done through others. You don’t get to claim you’re doing great while your team underperforms. That would be like an NFL coach with a terrible record claiming it has nothing to do with him (“It’s the players’ fault!”) As a manager, your team’s performance is your product.

2. You’re Going to Play a Big Role in Employees’ Lives

The relationship between manager and employee is fundamentally asymmetrical. You will interact with many employees each day, but there’s only one of you to them. You’re up there with their spouse in terms of impact on their daily quality of life. The mood they are in when they get home might depend on how you managed that day.

3. Your Employees Are Not Your Helpers. You Are Their Helper.

Some new managers think their team is there to help them get work done. It’s the opposite. Your job is to build your people into the best professionals they can be, to remove blockers, and to give them what they need to succeed. You’re there to serve their growth and enable their performance. See: Santa Claus vs. Orchestra Conductor:

The Santa Claus Model of Management Doesn't Work

4. Your Unit of Operation Is Now People, Not Projects

Some people are more comfortable dealing with things than with people. I’m one of them. But as a manager, people are your domain. An effective sales manager organizes their world around the salespeople they manage, not around specific deals.

5. You Can Do a Lot More Harm

As an individual contributor, the worst you can do is collect a paycheck and do nothing. But if you’re a bad manager, you can stifle the morale of your whole team and drive away top performers. As you go up the management chain, your capacity for impact grows, both positive and negative.

6. You Are Now “They”

Once you’re in management, you’re part of the company’s power structure. When your team goes to happy hour and complains about “them,” they now mean you. It doesn’t matter if you started on the factory floor with those employees years back. The dynamic changes.

7. Hard Conversations Will Be Required

As manager, you will be called upon to deliver tough feedback, address performance issues, and sometimes let people go. Avoiding uncomfortable conversations makes problems worse. If you’re not prepared to have hard conversations regularly, management isn’t for you.

8. Your Power Is Actually Quite Limited

The most direct power you have is the ability to fire someone, and you can only do that once. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem. You can’t simply command people to do what you want. You need to learn more nuanced ways to influence your team.

9. You’re Going to Learn About Yourself

Management is a mirror. You’ll discover your biases and your default patterns under stress. You’ll see how you handle conflict, whether you micromanage or under-manage, and where your blind spots are.

10. You May Be Asked to Play Therapist and Mediator

People will bring you their personal problems, everything from conflicts with coworkers to their general anxieties and frustrations with life. You’ll be asked to mediate disputes and lend a listening ear to all sorts of things. You can’t and shouldn’t act as a real therapist, but you’ll need to navigate these dynamics with care.

Before you take that management job, ask yourself: Am I ready for this? Am I willing to shift from doing the work to enabling others to do the work? Can I handle the weight of impacting people’s lives every day?

If the answer is yes, management can be one of the most rewarding paths you’ll take. Just go in with your eyes open.