Many of my younger clients (thirty something) want to first transition into management from being an individual contributor, and then, finally, into the business side of their company. Being in the Valley and being an engineer myself first, then an engineering manager, and having run and consulted with few businesses, many of these clients come to me asking for advice on what they need to do to become successful in their future roles as managers and as business leaders. In almost all cases my answer is the same: Learn how to go from understanding and dealing with certainty, to dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity.
Let me explain:
As an individual contributor most young professionals are used to dealing with certainty. They mostly deal with “things,” which are defined by their superiors, with specific directions to produce an outcome: analyze a complex structure and find the points of failure under certain stress conditions; write a software code to create some functionality with certain amount of memory and available power; create an ad copy that produces a certain message; write a legal brief to make a certain point to the judge, and so on. Each of these tasks is bound by certain rules that are well known, and when you create the necessary outcome you have done your job well!
The next step in the evolution of an individual contributor is becoming a manager. Here, you are translating what you have learned as a professional skill from your individual-contributor role does not always translate into what is required from you to succeed as a manager. This requires understanding what a manager does to get their work done (through others) without doing it all themselves. This requires understanding how humans behave and what motivates them.
Those—as individual contributors—previously steeped in certainty, are now suddenly faced with situations that they do not fully understand. How do you get others to produce, in a predictable way—schedules, budgets, and specifications, where every individual is different and is marching to their own drum? As daunting as it may sound, this is really not all that difficult.
In my previous blogs I have written about the four functions of managing: Leading, Organizing, Planning, and setting up Controls, which bring order to the process of managing others. Knowing how to execute your role by understanding these four functions of managing, and the tasks that fall under each function, managing others can be made quite predictable. Understanding these functions of a manager and how they translate into an effective management process is at the heart of becoming a successful and effective manager. This requires changing your mindset about how to apply the new rules that allow you to shift your power to create certainty from “things” to “people.” By achieving this goal you grow in the process and learn new things.
The same or similar challenge evinces when one is making a transition from being a manager to becoming a business leader. Here, you not only have the challenges of managing your people reporting to you, but also all the factors that make up for the business world and its complex ecosystem that you are trying to deal with: economy, interest rates, foreign competition, changing labor laws, changing government regulations, and so on. You can call these “business forces.” So, now you need to make a transition from dealing with “people” to managing “business forces.”
Once again, the challenge is not that different from the one you faced when you became a manager. Just as there are rules that govern how to manage effectively, there are also rules that govern how to deal with business situations effectively. Here, you must bring to your job a combination of technical skills (from being an individual contributor), your people skills (from being a manager), and the new business skills (from now being a business leader). Yes, there is more uncertainty in the flux that you are now dealing with, but this is what makes it more interesting. Dealing with forces that are not always predictable, and making a call based on your analyses, insights, and your intuition is what makes the job of a business leader much more challenging—and hence rewarding.
So, in my view how you become a successful business leader depends on your ability to first becoming an excellent individual contributor, then understanding people skills to manage using the four functions of managing, and finally, developing conceptual skills fortified by some of the hard skills that you can learn from taking appropriate business courses, or learning them on your own! Remember, you may never use what you learned from being an individual contributor to be an effective business leader, but that is a necessary step in your evolution as an effective leader!
Good luck!