moving into management
January 13th, 2009
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One of the common questions I get about moving to the next level via the management road. i.e. should I move from an individual contributor role into management ? Or should I move into a 2nd level management position from a 1st level management position? To help highlight the difference, here is how I see the differences.
Individual Contributor
- deliver the results
- role skills – the skills are task related
- communication skills definitely help
- realistic work forecasting is a significant benefit
1st level manager
- care about the people on the team
- deliver the results as part of the team
- still have the role skills – not only for IC deliverables but also for coaching employees
- IC recruiting
- communication skills
- start to understand how to grow people
- need to do work allocation for the team
- responsible for the well being of the team
- work forecasting needs to be done for the team
- soft skills to deal with people (down, peer and up)
- delegation – most difficult one – how to delegate work to the team
2nd level manager
- people
- deliver the results through the work of others
- people growth
- manager recruiting
- succession planning
- communication, negotiation and conflict resolution skills
- realistic work forecasting needs to be done for the team
- need to deal across groups, ideally joint objectives
- soft skills to deal with people
- budgeting
- manage team visibility
Please let me know if I missed anything.