What Is My Job Now?

Whether your new position is external at a new organization, or an internal move; following your successful application and interview, you are likely to have a settling in or transition plan. This plan will be agreed between you and your hiring manager, with the primary purpose of the plan being to set expectations and a reasonable timescale for you to familiarize and truly establish yourself in your new job and environment.

One of the first steps – if not the very first step – will be to clarify what your new managerial role really means. This might sound strange because you've just been through an application and interview process, where you were asked specific questions to ascertain how you would perform as a manager. However, there is another level of detail that needs to be worked out. Unsurprisingly perhaps, in quite a lot of cases, new positions are created and filled without a crystal-clear role profile of task-level responsibilities.

In the real world, especially for managerial positions, organizations often hire on an urgent business need to solve a problem. How to solve that problem has not been fully thought out yet.

As a manager, you have the decision-making scope and responsibility to figure this out. So, one of the key inputs to your plan is what you think you need to do to make this happen. This is true even if your position is a backfill – which could be the urgent business problem itself! The previous person may have moved on, and you were brought in to run an existing team or project. An effective hiring manager will be looking to you to replicate or maintain what is already successful, as well as new ideas to improve and transform the team or project if required.

But if we start with an open mind and a blank canvas, there is clearly a learning and information gathering phase for all new managers to undertake. In our Developer-to-Manager context, I would always advise new managers to take the time to understand the wider organization. Even if it's an internal move and you already think you know the organization as a developer, this is still important.

For instance, you will now likely be part of regular management meetings where the management agenda, department performance, people matters, and future project pipeline is discussed. These items are usually not shared with the rest of the organization due to their human and commercial sensitivity.

In my experience, a management meeting between all manager attendees feels and runs very differently to a functional meeting involving developers and other functional roles. Typically, managers are more expressive and talkative. It is an implicit part of their jobs to participate in, as well as facilitate, discussions. So, that is what they will naturally do. In an all-managers meeting, you are likely to be competing for time to air your views, rather than stimulating the conversation in a battle against awkward silence.

These management meetings are a perfect place to listen and learn about the wider organization from a new perspective. You may be surprised at how freely your fellow managers will share their challenges with you, followed by request for your help to overcome these challenges. This mutual sharing is a positive trait and cultural indicator of the organization. Collective problem-solving is at the heart of good management.

Outside of such meetings, you should also proactively solicit feedback and ideas on an individual basis, to gather information such as:

• What is the organization or department's short-term and long-term vision?
• What are the most critical problems or frequent issues of other managers?
• How can you and your team help them succeed?

Through their collective responses, you can triangulate what and where the business problem you were hired to solve is.

An extra interesting aspect of these questions and their answers will be whether they are consistent between managers. Through this consistency, you can gauge how well the organization's goals have filtered into complimentary or competing individual goals.

In short, the key job change from a developer to a manager is that your primary focus is solving someone else's problem. Therefore, what your job is at any one time is more variable and should be adapted to their needs.

Furthermore, a highly effective manager will be looking to prevent problems from happening in the first place. This will require experience and a savviness to anticipate the likely future needs of the people you work with, and the wider industry.

Whether you will still have coding and related developer responsibilities is a topic we'll answer in a later chapter. For now, the focus is on problem solving, which begins with gathering enough information to understand the problem.

If you are a team manager with people-management responsibilities, then remember to also consult with your team for their input. Their views are vital for you to understand your own team's challenges, as well as creating an open and trusting relationship with your team members by making them feel heard and valued.

These challenges may be similar to those shared by other managers, or they could be different altogether. They could also be different takes of the same problem.

For example, a Project Manager may say to you that their project timeline is slipping. They think it's caused by the development team not understanding the requirements. However, your team's view is that the requirements are unclear and have gaps, and so they need to constantly go back to the business to clarify what they really mean. This elongates the whole development process, which causes the project timeline to slip.

Getting to the bottom of this problem by appreciating and understanding it from more than one perspective is essential to solving it. Finally, while proactively looking to understand the current problems holistically is a great place to start, remember to keep the problems you find in context and balanced with everything else.

It's all too easy to get bogged down and demoralized by the amount and scale of problems. In any organization, there will always be problems. It can seem like a never-ending cycle of problem discovery! But there will also be lots of solutions and more positive wins and outcomes.

Quality dialogue with your team and fellow managers through healthy, sensible, and balanced conversations should also highlight areas that are operating well. This keeps everything in perspective and will give you a better view of what are the real things you need to tend to first, therefore, allowing you to work out: what is my job now?

We've talked about what your job is now that you've got it, so let's talk about the seven fundamental roles that you'll encounter, plus what to expect, and what you should do on your first day and your first week.