A great analogy, if you'd like to know how it feels to be a manager:
Imagine moving out of your parents' place and living on your own.
You sleep when you want, eat when you want, and not need to warn anyone that you'll be coming home late.
With all that freedom, you also have to make choices:
- What time should I eat every day?
- What should I eat?
- When should I wash my clothes?
- When should I sleep?
Before, things were easy.. Got a problem you can't fix? Ask your parents.
Need to be picked up from somewhere? Call your parents.
They will need to figure something out.
But now you're on your own.
Got a problem you can't fix? Well if you don't fix it, no one else will.
I'd say something very similar happens in the workplace.
Are you a non-manager employee? Then you don't have to make big choices.
Have an unusual problem? Customer's getting angry? Call the manager!
Don't know what to do? Call the manager!
What if you become the manager?
You become the decision maker, and you are the one responsible.
Want to assign someone work? Go ahead. They'll do it.
Didn't assign anyone to some work? It won't be done.
Was a client expecting it to be done 2 weeks ago? That's your problem.
It's your task to be good at resource management, and estimating how long it'll take to get something done. You need to manage client expectations.
Most of your time spent will be working with clients, figuring out what needs to get done.
By clients, I mean anyone outside your team.
That may mean actual customers/clients outside the company, but it may also mean working with managers from other teams.
If you're wondering what goes on in these calls between managers, lets go back to the analogy of living on your own.
Except now you're living with roommates.. And you guys need to figure out who's going to be:
- Washing the dishes
- Throwing out the trash
- Cleaning the floor
- Getting the mail
Is everyone going to take turns doing all the tasks?
Is everyone going to have designated tasks?
Will one guy get away with not doing anything?
Also, you have to make sure someone else isn't doing your work.
Is your roommate throwing out the trash instead of you?
Does he keep forgetting to place a new bag into the trash bin?
Well everyone's going to blame you, because you're the designated guy that throws out the trash.
You'll have to meet, and figure out, either:
- He will need to take on the responsibility of placing a new bag too, replacing your duties.
- He will have to signal to you when he's taken out the trash, so you place a new bag in right after..
- He stops taking out the trash, and you do that instead, so others stop blaming you for not having a bag there.
All of this sounds like silly small details, but it builds up over time, especially if you have lots of stuff to get done.
As a manager, you will need to negotiate with all the other managers/clients what your team will be doing.
If
your team ends up doing more/harder/tedious/useless work than other
teams, it will be your fault, because that's the result of your poor
negotiation skills.
Managing
client expectations, negotiating with the clients, all of this work
might leave you tied to the phone and meetings all day.
You have to keep making sure your team doesn't get overloaded.
Oh and by the way, as a manager, you have to be self sufficient. You can't depend on
your manager to get things done. Especially if your boss is a director. They don't want to have anything to do with your problems.
They have their own problems to deal with.
It's like complaining to your housing agency that your roommates are misbehaving. The agency has other things to worry about:
- Managing payments
- Dealing with insurance, legal documents
- Preparing new rooms for service
- Showing rooms
- Advertising
That's just how it is..
As a manager, you can certainly complain to
your manager about problems going on in the
company, but understand that he might judge you for not being able to handle such a problem on your own.
If you, as a Manager, are having a hard time getting along with some other Manager, you're probably going to have to handle it, with politics and conflicts of interests.
You'll need to be extra careful during negotiations with that person and make sure you don't get some problems for your team in the future.
And depending on the company structure, that might happen either very rarely, or every single day. Just like with good and bad roommates.
