What are the good attributes of a new Senior Manager ?

Are you a new Senior Manager/Manager of Managers ? Did you only manage Individual Contributors(ICs) and senior ICs before and are you going to manage Managers for the first time ? Or is your team growing very fast and you are about to manage more managers.

There are a lot of articles to help out folks converting from IC to management. However, I have found few articles on being a good Senior Manager managing other managers. The goal of this article is help you bootstrap and avoid some common pitfalls. Hopefully you will also appreciate the difference between managing ICs and Managers. This is one of the most common pitfalls of new Senior Managers and the part that they find hardest during the transition.

A common question that engineers ask is what does my skip do ? This article should be a good read for engineers to understand your skip better.

There are two broader dimensions (2Ps) : Project and People that we will talk about.

Project 

1. As a Senior Manager, you need to manage a manager by setting expectations based on business metrics and outcomes. You have to give flexibility and freedom to the manager about how to achieve these goals. If you start thinking too much about the "how" then you will end up micromanaging the manager. You have to detach from the project perspective and only think from outcome perspective. The manager should have the independence to create an appropriate roadmap, work with PM, determine team composition and structure, setup collaborations to hit the goals. 
2. On the other side, while managing ICs as a Senior Manager, you may be more attached and involved from the project perspective. This is how the nature of the job may look different while managing other Managers vs other ICs. You will probably have a few senior ICs reporting to you directly and hopefully through them you are personally attached to only the most important projects in your team. This will help you scale as the team grows.
3. On the first point, I mentioned that you need to detach from the "how". That is both true and not true. It is more nuanced. You can regulate the "how" and this is your way of setting technical direction/culture of the team. Here are some examples of regulations to set : 

the operational efficiency of the team should improve quarter over quarter(reliability SLAs, oncall load, system outages, weekly post mortems) 

the engineering quality should meet minimum bar(test coverage above x%, design docs and processes, deployment schedules, ab testing guidelines) 

data quality standards 

These regulations will also determine the engineering culture in your organization and hopefully this is also what you promote and reward in performance reviews. This is what you need to be in sync with your new Manager report because this will be a key part of the performance conversations. The regulations don't always need to be top down. These can be and should be bottoms up from the Manager and the ICs. This brings us to the next dimension : People

People

As a Senior Manager, you set/establish the culture of your team. People are a big part of the culture and who you hire is key to maintain and grow that culture. While you draw major components from your company and organization(director's) culture, you should also work together with your manager reports and senior ICs and customize it as you see fit. From here on, you have to give the Manager the freedom to hire/retain/manage the people they think are fit for the team and for achieving the team goals while thriving and growing the team culture. You should be available to help them navigate edge cases whenever needed, for eg: a sell call to help close that rockstar candidate.

There are a few ways you can regulate the people side and make sure things are on check without micromanaging the manager :

• do regular skip level 1:1s to keep a tab on the pulse of the team. conducting good skip level 1:1s is an art and takes years of experience. that itself could warrant a complete post
• every company has some kind of manager survey that they conduct. make sure that the top concerns expressed in those surveys are regularly being addressed by the Manager. This will be your way of growing the Manager reporting to you and this will ensure that the team trusts you and feels that their feedback is actionable

This post is geared towards new Senior Managers. I have deliberately left out other aspects when a Senior Managers/Director has several Managers reporting to him. These managers may be collaborating internally and externally to hit some of their goals. Those are more advanced topics and create a different set of dynamics. I will save that for another post.

If you are a Senior Manager/Manager of Managers and have read this far, I would like to thank you for your time. I would love to hear your thoughts about this article, things you wish someone had told you when you started out and anything else that could benefit the community.

For engineers reading this article, hope this sheds some light into the life of your skip. Do you know now what your skip does ? Would love to learn more. Please leave your stories in comments.