How To Be The Type of Manager That Gets Promoted to Director
Why the IC to Manager transition is rough and how to navigate it like you know what you’re doing. Plus 3 skills every manager should master.
Welcome to Reframed by Ashley Rudolph. One idea, every week, that changes how you see your career.
Last week, I published How 3 Successful People Unplug. If you need inspo for your next OOO, bookmark it.
If you’re new here, welcome! Lately I’ve been reflecting on the things I wish I knew at certain points in my career. I channeled those reflections, distilled from 1000+ hours of conversations with ambitious leaders into two things that I’m excited to share with you:
A series about what I wish I knew at the Manager, Director, and VP levels. I’ll be publishing each one over the next 3 weeks. I’m starting with the Manager level today. If it’s relevant to you, enjoy! And if you have a manager in your life, send this to them.
An assessment that measures whether you’re on a promotion track. One of the most frequent questions I get on Substack and on TikTok is “how do I know if I’m going to be promoted?”. I’ve learned that promotions come down to: 1. whether decision makers at your company value you and your contributions 2. whether opportunities to move up exist. That’s it. And it sits on a matrix High / Low Value and High / Low Opportunity. If you’re curious to see where you stand, take the assessment.
Onto this week’s newsletter.
MY STORY
What happened when I stepped into people management
When I was promoted to the manager level, I struggled to let go of control. Before my promotion, I was a high performing individual contributor. I was running my programs, hitting my goals, and getting praise for my ability to deliver.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t receive a rush from the recognition.
So after my promotion, I made the same mistake that most first-time managers do: I stayed hyper-focused on the weeds of my direct reports’ work; reviewing everything closely, handing them my specific templates, and taking note of whether they were executing the way I would have executed. Because to me, that was how they’d be successful too.
My mindset was: every single thing that comes out of my team is a reflection of me. So I have to manage their work closely, because it’s my reputation on the line.
Self-centered leadership.
If you’ve felt this, I’d make a strong argument that you’re probably not the perfectionist or control freak you think you are, you’re just holding onto patterns of behavior that made you succeed at work in the first place.
And now, you have to let them go.
After a few hiccups (aka me intuiting that I was annoying tf out of a team member), I changed my approach. What that shift unlocked was me finally reflecting on what my team needed to accomplish and how the people on my team, with their own strengths and their own ways of working, could get us there.
My new goal was for everyone to do their best work. And in order for them to do that, I had to figure out how to get the best output out of each person on my team.
BACKGROUND CONTEXT
What do managers do, anyway?
The day you become a manager is disorienting. Previously, your standard for excellence was your work. Your output, your quality bar, your reputation for delivering. That’s what got you promoted. And suddenly, your job is no longer to be the best doer on the team.
So let me say plainly what the job actually is, because most people are never told.
A manager’s job is to…..
Lead your team, evaluate their work, set clear performance standards, and develop your team such that they're producing better work than they could have before you were in seat.
In a nutshell, your job is to be excellent at managing other people’s work and that requires three skills:
Setting standards and accountability so people know what good looks like before they start.
Knowing how to measure work you didn’t do (and maybe even for people who used to be your peers - awkward!).
Delivering feedback that actually helps people hit the bar, without dreading every conversation.
That’s it. Everything else is calendar management :)
VALUE / OPPORTUNITY MATRIX
What successful managers do differently
Your ability to advance at every level of leadership comes down to two things: value and opportunity. So I created the Promotability Quotient (outlined in the screenshot below), to measure it.
In the rest of today’s newsletter, I’m going to share what skills get read as “high value” at the manager level. In general, this is where you build your expertise. I spent my time at the Manager level becoming an expert in my lane. I leaned into process design and I leveled up the skills necessary to run a business (advanced Excel, budget ownership, public speaking, presentation design). Those things helped me increase my Value. What are yours?
THE FRAMEWORK
How to be the manager they can't afford to lose
One of the biggest challenges for new managers is the IC > Manager transition. The shift from doer to leader and, in some cases, from peer to boss is rough.
Here’s what I wish I knew before becoming a Manager
1. Be intentional about getting out of the weeds.
Your advantage as a manager is that you probably know how to do the work of your team, which is exactly what makes you qualified to lead it. The trap is using that knowledge to do the work for them. Getting out of the weeds isn’t about willpower or “trusting your team more” as a vibe. It’s about building the systems that stop work from defaulting to you in the first place.
The post below walks through the systems me and my clients lean on: RACIs, creating role clarity, raising the bar on what your team brings to your 1:1s so you’re coaching instead of triaging, and a way to redirect work that lands on your plate without just absorbing it. There’s a RACI template in there you can copy.
Getting out of the weeds also means you have to measure work you didn’t do and that’s its own trap. Left to instinct, many managers make the mistake of measuring how closely their team’s work matches how they would have done the task. You get out of this cycle by defining what good looks like before they start a task. This is called establishing success criteria. It lets them know what “complete” actually means to you. If you ask for a report on a business segment, do you just want the data analysis or the insights on that data too? If you ask for a logo, did you want three options to choose from or their single best recommendation with their reasoning? Those are wildly different definitions of “done,” and if you didn’t name which one you meant, you don’t get to be disappointed when the answer doesn’t meet your expectations.
Scroll to the 4C framework for my tips on how to delegate effectively.
2. Moving from peer to boss may be one of the toughest transitions in leadership.
Yesterday, these people were your peers. Maybe your friends. You vented together, you compared notes, you were all on the same level. And then you move into a Manager role and…you’re on a different level entirely. The dynamic that you’ve built changes.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes here:
Being too deferential because the person I was now managing was more senior than me
Maintaining friendships without boundaries
Sharing information that should’ve stayed in leadership meetings because I thought I was being a “cool boss”
These are normal mistakes and I wish I had a better playbook to navigate them. It wasn't until my friend Kendra told me to download the Manager Tools podcast that I had language for what I was going through! If I were doing it all over again, I would:
Say what needs to change now that I’m in a different role (boundaries!)
Own my place as leader of the team, sharing my vision for driving the team and for supporting each person on it
I also wish I had the podcast episode linked below to guide me. Muriel Wilkins (another executive coach) walks a listener through becoming their close friend’s boss, and her case for handling it head-on instead of tiptoeing around it:
3. Give direct feedback.
There’s good feedback and there’s bad feedback. There’s useful feedback and there’s useless feedback. Bad feedback tears people down, makes them feel stupid, and makes them question themselves. Useful feedback is centered on their work. If someone missed the deadline that you agreed on, it’s useful feedback to tell them that their work didn’t meet the standard that was set. If someone’s slide deck is filled with way too much content and isn’t driving towards a clear point, it’s useful feedback to tell them they lost you three slides into the deck and what would make it better. Giving them the feedback assumes they’re capable of hearing the truth and doing something with it. It shows you respect them.
Your job as a manager is to get skilled at the useful kind of feedback that your team needs: specific, tied to a standard you set, and delivered by someone (you!) who clearly wants them to win.
You never want to make anyone feel less than. And you never want to leave them guessing either. The post below walks through my 4-step framework for giving the right kind of constructive feedback.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Two things to try this week
If you saw yourself in any of this (good or bad), that’s a good thing. We love self awareness on Reframed!
I want you to try something, pick one piece of work you’re still holding onto that someone on your team should own. Hand it off, but before you do set your success criteria, be clear about your standards and expectations of them, and of course - set a deadline. Let me know how it goes :)
And if you want to know exactly where you stand (how valued you are, and whether a real path exists at your company) take my Promotability Quotient. It takes a few minutes and it’ll tell you which side of the equation needs your attention first.
Next Monday, I’ll be writing about what I’d do if I were starting a director role today.
Good luck. See you next week!
Ashley
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