zoom out

I wasn’t born to be a manager.

Let me tell you a story.

I have a subscription to my barber, Steve, also known as The Executive Barber. (If you’re in Chicago, check him out.) He has been the only person to cut my hair since I was in college, because loyalty is one of my core values.

Steve and I love to talk about the things going on in our lives - it’s very therapeutic and a big part of why getting my haircut feels like a self-care spa day.

One time, when I was about 2 years into my career, a budding Senior Software Engineer, I remember sitting in Steve’s chair, getting my go-to: side fade, long on top. We were having a particularly riveting chat about the psychology of siblings, and how I could be a better mentor to my younger brother.

As Steve shared his perspective, I clearly remember thinking: wow, this is a valuable conversation. Out loud, I said to Steve: “What if we recorded the conversations we have in here and turned it into a podcast?”

As Steve mulled it over, my overactive engineering brain immediately started firing with the technical challenges of recording high quality audio in a barbershop. What kind of mic should we get? Would we be able to remove the noise of the hair clippers in post-processing? What about the sounds of passing traffic?

…

What was wrong with my initial reaction there?

It feels silly in hindsight, but it was just a telltale sign of being a passionate engineer: digging deep into the details. I saw myself as an engineer not afraid to get my hands dirty, so of course I started to immediately think about the execution details. As I later learned, this translates poorly into management.

As a manager, it’s not your job to get bogged down by the details. It’s your job to zoom out and look at the big picture.

I had engineering in my blood, not management. If I was born a manager, the question I asked would have been: “Is this a high quality idea that will have demand and add value to listeners?” In that moment, this is the only question that mattered. All the other technical details can be figured out down the road. That’s what the team is for.

To this day, leading teams of 20 engineers, I am still actively working on not getting trapped into the details. Being trained my whole life as an engineer makes it difficult to fully overcome this instinctual thinking, but I have seen myself getting better by being self-aware and acknowledging when it happens.

I’ve accepted that I can’t fully stop the thoughts. So, what I do now is “bookmark” these thoughts for later. I write them down, and put them away, and ask myself “What else?” Doing this helps me acknowledge the engineering concerns, but also allows me to ask the more important questions.

So try this out. The next time you’re working on a task, and someone offers a suggestion or improvement to it, slow down. Don’t immediately respond with a technical challenge that you foresee, or the implementation details. Instead, practice zooming out. Understand the bigger picture of what the impact might be to the end user experience, or to the overall company.

Don’t get me wrong - your ability to get your hands dirty as an engineer will help you become a better manager. You’ll be able to speak more knowledgeably with your engineers and be technically in-tune with their work.

But it’s not your job to be in the weeds. It’s your job to guide through them.

-Vigs

I hope you found this edition insightful. If you know a friend or colleague who would find value in this newsletter, tell them to join us at gcmgmt.beehiiv.com. It’ll mean the world to me.