Notes from a Newbie Manager

This post is mainly a summary of what I've learnt so far after becoming a manager. Yes, I'm a newbie manager. I was offered with the position soon after I finished my master study on 2017. I was confused at first, because I've never had experience of becoming a manager and I felt like I was still too junior. Who am I to be someone leading a team of five, to be the one they will look up to? I can't lie that those insecurities hit me real hard when I finally made the decision to take the offer of becoming Data Lead.

But now, I'm thankful that I made that choice. Being a manager has taught me so much, much more that I could ever gain from sitting in a class, doing any types of assignments (individual or group assignment). I observed different sides of me that I never thought I had before, which turn out to be things I enjoy doing and challenging at the same time.

And this is the summary of what "Being a manager.." means to me. This will be a live document, so any new observations will be added to this page.

1. Being a manager trains you to always think about actual root cause of a problem, to be able to find the solution that matters, that can solve not only the current symptom but also future possible problems.
2. Being a manager (especially people manager) teaches you about empathy, humility, and perspective taking. To always take the other person’s perspective before taking decision, to always delay judgement before you have enough evidence and assessment. Empathy is important especially when you are a people manager, not just project / product manager. You are responsible for your team’s wellbeing and growth. Newbie managers might feel that too much of their time is consumed to care about your subordinates problem. Well actually, that is part of your job (I came to this realisation after reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott book). In fact, you have to find time to always speak to them regularly, to ensure they are always on the right track and you keep up on their latest status or condition. You might have to deal with their personal problems which impact their work performance, and you have to manage that well so as not to hurt other functions interacting with your team member, while still caring for him / her.
3. Being a manager requires you to plan and retrospect well. You constantly have to reflect back on what works and doesn’t work for you and your team, and use it to plan ahead the strategy for the team. This will allow them to constantly grow, by learning from past mistakes (ensuring not to make same mistakes twice).
4. Sometimes, being a manager feels like being a second Mom (P.S. I’m even worried that some of team members actually think of me as their actual mom lol). You have to give emotional support when it’s needed, give advice, and more importantly, give reward when it’s due. This is especially hard when you’re leading a team of not outspoken ones. There is a certain treatment needed to be able to know what they actually feel and what you need to do to help them. Giving emotional support is even harder when you yourself is on a wreck. You need to maintain your emotion / composure over your own problems. When your team member makes mistakes, you need to construct a situation in which the realisation of this mistake is built on themselves. This has to be done very carefully, and you have to be radically candid. This might absorb much of your emotional energy when you are not used to it. (Happens to me many times)
5. Being a manager means you have to become subject matter expert over the things your team is expected to deliver, and being able to think more forwardly than the others in terms of how to deliver better. One of very important things that I learn as a manager is that you need to put standards and process in place to optimise your team’s output, using your expertise and knowledge in the field.
6. Being a manager means you need to make better decision,  faster. One of the hardest responsibilities of a manager is making a lot of hard decisions for the team. In doing so, you need to consider all aspects, conflicting priorities between multiple stakeholders and decide the stance of you and your team. Manager revolves a lot around stakeholders management, and each stakeholders have their own priorities & agendas which in few cases (especially in silo organisation) might not align with each other really well. The manager has to take into account all of this and decide which one will be the priorities, right. 
7. Being a manager means you need to be someone respected, not only by your own team members but by other managers / counterparts so that your team has confident in you and can put their trust in you.

P.S. One of my colleagues recently shared me great articles with similar theme as above—knapsack of lessons from being a manager—written by someone much more senior, which I found very honest and conclusive:

https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-f2c42d68604b

https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-part-2-7c22fc9d87ed