[motohagiography]

My experience with going back and forth between manager and IC a few times over my career (I prefer to be what I call a radical-IC, usually a specialist consultant), it's important to understand how different the competencies are.

First, a manager is not a super-engineer. Rarely are super-engineers good managers, and rarely are exceptional managers really good engineers.

Second, we need to separate management from leadership, and this razor does it really well: leadership scales effort, management extracts value.

Super-engineers have some natural leadership because they can scale their brains by adding others with clear explanations, mentoring, and leveraging others. However, this also is why you can have great team leadership on products that go nowhere because there is no one managing to figure out how to extract the value from the amazing technical feats your scaled and well-led team is accomplishing.

Teams with lots of management but little leadership feel like optimizing to get blood from a stone, because micromanagement is the antithesis of scaling effort, as it's about micro-optimizing extracting value on a linear, monotonic basis without any scale. But that's just the anti-pattern. Great management is when you have customers who are happy and interested in what you are doing because you've managed to extract value from your team and made them that way. You've given customers the thing that empowers them in their own organizations because you understand the factors that go into your product, and how to balance them so that what comes out is valuable to others.

Third, to transition to management, find a role to do pure management in a domain that isn't your top skill, where you can focus on the aggregate value instead of getting sucked into solving the problems themselves. This is counter-intuitive, but most important things are, so if you are a good programmer, don't start with managing developers. Do ops or better, a customer success/support team. Product is cool and interesting, but it's still an IC role, management means extracting value from teams. The path to CTO means managing teams and departments, so find something unsexy (like customer support) and take that on.

Alternatively, join a small company or startup and take over one of their teams, or get a 6-12mo contracting gig as a project manager with resource accountability. Long comment, and YMMV, but consider these dynamics on your quest.

[nartz]

Disagree with some of this. There is a need to define what 'management' actually 'is'. Great 'managers' are leaders imho. The difference being, that they help inspire and motivate a team, and help contribute to vision, direction, and clarity which a team can rally around, while encouraging collaboration and excellence, and setting clear and ambitious expectations.

Great ICs actually have a huge advantage here, because the key skill for an IC is often technology skills, whereas the key skill for a great leader/manager is trust with the team. Being able to have a deep technical understanding of the problem space will help to develop trust that much faster. However, the key transition is then to get out of the way, and use your knowledge to help challenge ideas while growing the team. The #1 piece of advice is to hold back from giving answers, and instead, challenge people with questions, to let them do the thinking.

[motohagiography]

Toward expanding the explanation, this is why I separated them. Leadership is neither sufficient or necessary for managers - as evidenced by the survival of every large organization. Management skill is neither sufficient or necessary for leadership, because leadership is less a thing than it is just the effect of being followed. I'm a big advocate of the necessity of charisma and inspiration, but crappy managers often think of themselves as leaders as a substitute and an excuse for failure, and leaders often don't accept responsibility for creating and managing the value feedback loop that sustains their teams - also as a substitute and an excuse for failure. I've reckoned with both, and they're hard to face, but well worth it. Somewhere between these poles is truth, and the art of managing and leading that I think you're referencing is technique applied to the more fundamental role differences I was implying.

[jka]

I don't have much to add to the conversation here, but an upvote doesn't seem to suffice in order to indicate that your separation of leadership and management into two separate (and potentially overlapping) qualities feels like a really useful one, thank you.

[fatnoah]

>leadership scales effort, management extracts value

I love this take and have been saying something similar for a long time. A successful org needs both of these qualities to function well.

[zarkov99]

What an amazingly thoughtful take. Thanks for this. I have always felt there was a difference between managing (which I dislike) and leading (which I do like) but was never quite able to put it in words.