Managing people is a craft
21 November 2024
I distinctly remember the first week I managed a team. I had just taken on a people management role after working for some years as a designer. The assumption I carried, absorbed from the various organisations I’d been at, was that I had stepped up into a more senior design job.
I would now lead design for the whole product. I had solid design experience and a track record of wins. This was a complex domain, but I would bring solutions. I would know what to do.
Because that was my job now. Right?
By day two I had completely botched my first 1–1 as a people manager. My earnestly offered ‘solutions’ turned out to be both incorrect and unwanted. The designer on my team was imminently capable and had a deep understanding of their project. Our conversation was noticeably awkward.
That same week I confused two engineering teams by jumping in to do some ‘important’ design myself, making it wholly unclear whether they should be working with me or their embedded designers.
Needless to say, that first week didn’t go so well. On Friday I camped in the coffee shop a few blocks down, ordered a double strength espresso, and tried to work out why my well practiced design techniques were not working.
I’m a good designer, I thought. Why is this going so wayward?
Like many before me, I was treating the step into people management as a promotion — a more senior version of what I was already doing. It took some time, some coaching, some reading, and lots of listening before I realised:
Managing people is a craft.
I had not been promoted as a designer, but rather moved sideways into the parallel, and noticeably different, track of people management.
As a craft, managing people has specific skills and techniques to hone. It can be taught and practiced. There are communities of practitioners all around the world that one can participate in and learn from. In fact, it’s a craft that has been cultivated for thousands of years.
And like any craft, we start at basecamp not the summit.
When I realised that I was a beginner in a new craft, the craft of managing people, it brought me such profound relief. I wasn’t terrible at this. I was learning.
To learn effectively requires an awareness that one’s skills or knowledge could be better, an awareness that there is room to improve. The trap with treating people management as just a more senior version of whatever one was doing before, is that this awareness is missing. It’s easy to assume: I have well practiced skills. I have plenty of experience in this work.
People management is a new craft, with a new set of skills.
As a designer I was used to diagnosing customer problems and creating solutions. Yet when I brought design solutions to a direct report’s 1–1, I was fundamentally misunderstanding my new role as a people manager.
My role was to build trust and psychological safety. To support this designer and set them up for success. To ensure they had regular feedback loops and a path to grow their skills and career. To set clear expectations for them and hold them accountable.
Solving the design problem was the designer’s job, not mine.
When I realised that I had changed crafts it made a huge difference to how I approached not only my own role, but also the roles of others on my team. It was not only okay, but necessary, to let each person do their job — a job quite different to mine. This freed me to learn people management as I went, without feeling like I had to simultaneously be the most senior design craftsperson on the team.
Learning took time, of course, and skills like helping a designer grow their career didn’t come overnight. Yet by releasing myself to be a people manager, I returned autonomy and clarity to the designers reporting to me, allowing us to form a genuine team.
Managing people is a craft that I have come to deeply cherish and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had over the years to build and manage many teams, both in-person and remote. People management takes a lot of mental and emotional energy, but it’s very rewarding.
We know from research that good people managers matter, even when the research in question was framed as an attempt to prove the opposite. There is a competitive advantage available for all organisations who recognise the there are specific skills involved in managing people effectively and who invest in their people managers with coaching, training and dedicated paths for non-management leaders.
And if you find yourself in a role managing people, craftspersonship is only a mindset-shift away.
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