How to Know If You're Built to Thrive in Management (Part 2/2) (w. Narration)
The Daily Reality of Management: What You're Actually Signing Up For
Author narration now available.
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Thank you, dear reader! (or listener 🫡)
This article has one purpose:
To help you avoid becoming a manager and regretting the decision.
Before you step in, you need to see what you’re actually signing up for.
You’ve assessed yourself against the foundational traits from Part 1: self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation and feel you’ve got a baseline in each of these.
But feeling you can do management versus understanding what you’re actually going to deal with are two completely different things.
Reflecting on my years of management, I can see the thing that disillusions many new managers is that they jumped in without first understanding the role.
What follows are five daily realities you need to understand before you decide.
Read these not to be convinced management is wrong, but to go in with eyes wide open.
Reality 1: The Execution Paradox
You’re no longer the do-er.
For years, your value was tied to what you built.
But now your contribution is getting them to build it.
If your team does it well, no one notices you. If your team does it poorly, you are responsible.
This is one of the most difficult transitions in management. Accepting that their success is how you measure your impact.
Why this matters: Most Individual Contributors (ICs) assume management is just handing off work. They don’t realise they’re now accountable for outcomes they don’t directly control. If you understand this paradox too late, you either become a micromanager (controlling everything to ensure it’s right) or a ghost manager (disappearing because you can’t handle the responsibility).
The consequence: Burnt out teams that resent you, people leaving, or in worst cases being fired because targets aren’t achieved.
You have to manage the work without taking over. That requires balancing organisation and control. If you’re:
Disorganised and controlling, you’ve created chaos plus fear.
Organised and controlling, people resent you.
Neither organised nor controlling, nothing gets done.
Organised but not controlling, you’re discovering the sweet spot.
Staying organised without controlling means setting clear expectations then letting your team figure out how to get there, whilst giving them the support they need.
Striking that balance is a constant act of intention and can be exhausting. But it’s non-negotiable.
Reality 2: The Identity Crisis
You stop being the expert.
For years, when a hard problem came up, people sought you out and you were valued for what you knew.
Now you’re managing people who are often more specialised than you are (especially as you advance further into management). Your principal engineer is more up-to-date on systems design than you are. Your senior IC is deeper in their specialty than you could ever be.
And that’s the point of raising a great team, but it also means you’re not the expert anymore.
This can be disorienting for those who’ve built their identity around technical mastery. Now competence means knowing the right questions to ask, connecting the dots, and clearing obstacles.
Why this matters: If you don’t make this identity shift consciously, you’ll either try to stay technical and neglect management, become resentful of the role, or attempt to do both and burn out.
The consequence: Imposter syndrome spiraling into either leaving management or being ineffective at both IC and manager work.
The shift from being the best engineer to being a leader reveals a critical insight: technical excellence does not predict management success.
And that can be a tough pill to swallow for high performing ICs who become managers.
Reality 3: The Ambiguity You Can’t Solve
In a similar vein to the identity crisis, there’s also the problem solving crisis
Management problem solving doesn’t work like technical problem solving.
You’ll make a decision about team structure and not know for months if it was right. You’ll implement a process and never know if it’s working because of the process or despite it. You’ll have a conversation about performance and never fully know if it landed.
For analytical minds—which is what got many engineering ICs to management consideration—this is genuinely difficult. You’re used to solving problems with definitive answers. But management has none of that.
Why this matters: Analytical people can get paralysed by ambiguity. If you don’t accept that management problems have no single definitive solution, you’ll keep looking for “the answer.” You’ll re-solve the same problem obsessively and get trapped in analysis paralysis or decision fatigue, constantly second-guessing whether you made the right call.
The consequence: Burnout from never feeling confident in your decisions, or from spinning your wheels trying to find certainty that doesn’t exist.
The ones who thrive are the ones who can sit with ambiguity and make the best decision they can with incomplete information, then adjust as they learn more.
This is a prerequisite for moving forward. If you can’t tolerate that level of permanent uncertainty, management is not for you.
Reality 4: The Loneliness
You’re going to care for people who cannot care for you in the same way.
It’s structural.
They’re dependent on you for their career, their reviews, and their raises. So they can’t be fully vulnerable with you. The hierarchy exists whether you want it to or not.
Especially as your team grows, you realise you’re pouring out constantly, but nobody is pouring into you.
Your team can’t be your support system because they need you to be stable and reliable. Your manager is busy focusing at a higher level. And you’re often left to fend for yourself.
This is the harsh reality for many middle managers. Their responsibility flows in all directions, but often the support doesn’t flow back to them.
Why this matters: ICs often expect management to feel like a senior IC role with more authority and autonomy. What they didn’t anticipate is the isolation. If you don’t understand the one-way-care structure, you either try to be friends with your team (boundary violations), become resentful because support isn’t there, or burn out from carrying everything alone.
The consequence: Emotional breakdown, boundary violations that damage trust, or leaving the role entirely.
This is why self-awareness, regulation, and motivation from Part 1 are non-negotiable. Without self-awareness, you won’t see when feelings of isolation cross into dangerous territory. Without self-regulation, you buckle under the weight. Without self-motivation, you lose the drive to reflect and course correct.
To a degree, you need to become your own support system. Because oftentimes, nobody is going to be there when you need them.
Reality 5: The Environment Is Your Ceiling
Your effectiveness has a hard ceiling that is limited by your environment.
You can be brilliant at managing people, be great at making decisions, have a knack for creating a great team.
But then your manager changes. Or leadership makes a strategic decision that runs counter to everything you’ve been building. Or the culture in upper management is antithetical to your style.
In most cases, there’s nothing you can do about these systemic level problems.
Why this matters: New managers may assume their competence will shield them from organisational dysfunction, just like it did as an IC. It doesn’t.
The consequence: Misalignment between effort and outcomes, burnout from fighting the system, or deep regret that you chose the wrong org and can’t escape.
You can control your traits. You can control your decisions.
But you can’t control your manager’s capacity, the organisation’s culture, or leadership’s strategic choices.
These are the conditions you’re walking into and they’re unlikely to change drastically.
So you need to assess them before you leap.
Closing: Before You Decide
You know the foundational traits to thrive. But you now also know what the daily reality looks like.
You’re going to live with the execution paradox—trying to stay organised without controlling.
You’re going to have an identity crisis—discovering that being the expert isn’t your job anymore.
You’re going to experience real loneliness—responsibility flowing one direction, support not always there when you need it.
You’re going to make decisions in permanent ambiguity—never fully knowing if you’re right.
And you’re going to discover that how well you do all of this depends partly on factors completely outside your control.
Are you ready to reckon with this? Not have answers to it all. But sit with the uncertainty long enough to discover if this is actually for you?
If yes, then management might be right for you.
If you’re not sure, or if you already feel exhausted reading this, that’s information too.
Because you deserve to know what you’re signing up for—before you decide.
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