Unfettered Blather

As I touched on Friday, I was promoted to a management position in the company. Speaking in purely relative terms, it’s about as low in the company as you can get and still be considered a manager. Not to downplay it, but I still have plenty of people over me that I report to, so I’m anything but the big boss. This isn’t really my first time to be in a leadership position and I’ve been responsible for larger teams than the one I am currently leading, but it’s the first time I’ve had “manager” attached to my title.

When I joined my current company I put my career on hold. I took a step down. Before I left consulting my last position was as a “Technical Lead” and I was responsible for a team of 8 developers and 4 testers, each with their own team lead. I did a little coding but was primarily hands off. I felt like that job came too soon and so what I was looking for was a team lead position where I could be 50% hands on development and 50% administrative and leadership. As it turns out, the company I ended up working for didn’t want to move me straight into a team lead position, but the environment and team described made it sound like I had opportunities to be a mentor to junior developers and even train up the current team lead. The appeal of having a position that allowed me to be more than just another developer while also not necessarily having any additional responsibility sounded pretty good at the time, so I took it.

I didn’t mind taking a step down career-wise, but I also became complacent quickly. I’m good at solving problems, and the nastier the better. So I pretty happily took on one big issue after another. I drastically improved performance on the application I was assigned to. Yet, oddly, I wasn’t feeling challenged. There just got to be a point where I was sure I knew I could fix it.

The position I took over is not one I initially applied for. However, I took it because it looks like a challenge. There are a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainty. I’m confident I can succeed and help make the team a greater success. Still, there exists an unknown, a possibility of failure. I feel challenged again and I like it. Friday was my first day and on the drive home the enormity of what I had taken on hit me like a ton of bricks. Yet I’m not despairing because I think I’m at my best when I’m being challenged.

The one thing I’m hoping is that I have truly learned the lessons from the best managers I had. I want to emulate their example. I don’t want to be the pointy haired boss. I don’t expect to make everyone happy but I do think it’s now my job to make sure everyone I’m responsible for has the tools to be successful. I hope to be an enabler and not an obstacle.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.