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1. Make sure you understand what role you are striving for. People rarely agree what is difference between "Manager" and "Leader", but ensure you understand your own definition and what your preferences are.
(for myself: a Team Lead is also a subject area expert, and may spend time both guiding their team to success, coaching, mentoring, and interfacing with other teams and upper management; as well as performing design/architecture, assignment, troubleshooting and maybe even some hands-on work themselves. They are the person other team members turn to guidance.
Scariest sentence I heard in my university years was "A good manager needs not be a subject area expert", but I now understand it better: they understand the company, business, strategic imperatives, processes and frameworks, deadlines and pressures, stakeholders and environment; and ideally should work to remove obstacles from team members, ensure the team is working at high efficiency and in the right direction, and interface at high level with client and senior leadership. Team leads have more fun, but that statement is relative :) If going into management-proper:
2. Make sure you are prepared to give up the hands-on. Absolutely the hardest part for most technical people I've ever met. 3. Make sure you're prepared not to be the SME anymore. You simply won't have the time to be up-to-date on either every detail that's going on with the system or systems you're managing, or industry standards and movements. 4. Learn about people as voraciously as you would have about technical items. Communication is a hard skill to learn and cannot be acquired alone. Aggressively seek mentors and feedback. Run post-mortems: What happened in that meeting and why? Did we reach our goals? Why or why not? 5. Absolutely most importantly: take care of your people. Enable and support and coach them to success. This can be the least externally but most internally satisfying and gratifying part of the job. Depending on your workplace, you may or may not be recognized for developing your team, but this should be your #1 priority, and if you gain personal satisfaction from seeing your team members soar and take flight, you should do OK :) |