There’s no instant gratification in management- but you can still get it
When I transitioned from an IC role to management a few years ago, lots of people gave me lots of advice. That advice ranged from tips on how to manage my calendar and delegate more to navigating the new dynamic with people who I was friends and peers with before. The thing that no one really talked about though was how much longer seeing the results and impact from the work I was doing would now take and how rare the moments of instant gratification would be.
Anyone who has developed anything knows that feeling of instant gratification that is so common when coding- it comes when you fix a bug, see a unit test pass, make a frontend change that immediately hot-loads in your local dev environment, deploy your code, etc. It happens when you merge a PR or approve someone else’s. These little bursts of dopamine and serotonin make you feel good and allow you to measure success and progress in incremental stages. But what about management? Helping engineers grow in their careers, planning quarters ahead, implementing cultural initiatives and coordinating with stakeholders are all things that tend to take longer than a day’s worth of time. So how do you see the short term effects of your role and work and translate that into little moments of accomplishment? And more importantly how do you shift to appreciate the delayed gratification that is much more the hallmark of management?
1) Look for small wins everywhere and celebrate the team’s accomplishments as part of your own
Unfortunately, many managers have the tendency to only focus on the large flashy wins. I have definitely been guilty of this at times and as a result didn’t recognize some of the incremental milestones or smaller wins and worse didn’t necessarily call them out with the team around me. As a manager your team’s wins are also your wins and it is vital that you celebrate them with your team and digest part of them internally as your own. This means every time your team accomplishes a sprint goal, pushes a critical bug fix or releases an incremental update you should be viewing those as short term outcomes of your role as a manager.
But the wins are more than just what is execution related- and this is where it is vital that you look for wins in other places. Much of the manager role is coaching and providing feedback so whenever you see someone actioning on previous feedback use that as way of evaluating your success and impact. The overall health and psychological safety on the team is heavily influenced by the manager that helps lead it and so view instances like people being comfortable asking questions, the team having brainstorming sessions openly and everyone actively participating in retrospectives as longer term instant gratification wins (or shorter term delayed gratification depending on how you look at it.)
There are so many “small” wins that happen routinely and it is important to notice them and allow yourself to process them just like you processed the IC wins. The delayed gratification that comes from seeing what is built on top of the foundation you helped lay is what will power the large moments but the smaller instant gratification moments you find are what will allow you to feel accomplished at the end of every day.
2) Communicate the expected impact and outcome and recognize when it happens
The most important tool in any role- IC or management is effective communication. When it comes to calling out wins and recognizing accomplishments communication is obviously critical. But it’s also a huge part of how to identify the wins- big or small as well as how to understand the timeline- short term or long term.
In order to recognize something as a win, you need to understand the impact and why it is a good thing. The best way to make sure your team all shares in the wins that happen is to make sure everyone knows what the goals are. From short term milestones like sprint goals to longer term ones like scheduled releases or large scale tech debt improvements, if the team does not understand the importance of their work and the impact it has any wins that are accomplished will not be as meaningful. This is where the role of the manager really comes in and you are directly responsible for making sure people know why the wins are wins and helping publicize them.
If you only recognize the large wins, your team- and in some cases yourself as well- will lose motivation in those moments in between. I’m not saying treat every win or instance the same- I’m very much saying the opposite, but it is important to find a way of recognizing the small things both for the team and yourself that will allow the team to share in on the gratification as it is happening.
3) Ask for feedback constantly. And then listen to it.
I’ve spent a lot of times talking about wins in this post but its also important to recognize the losses and lessons learned. There is no better way as a manager to understand how you are doing than to ask your team. You have to constantly give them chances to give you feedback and you have to be willing to listen and action on it. If things are going well, ask how they can be even better. If things aren’t going well, ask how you can help or what would make it better. The single best way to gauge your value and impact as a manager is your ability to help your team. Whether it’s helping delegate work or freeing up time to being the intermediary to help protect their time there are many ways for you to immediately help address things. For the longer term things, checking in constantly and making sure everyone is aligned allows for the delayed gratification items to be just as if not more meaningful.
A lot of this is contingent on how you define and measure success as a manager (and that’s a whole other post I can write up) but whether you believe in recognizing and celebrating wins publicly or keeping them personal, the key in all of this is to find ways of adjusting your mindset to appreciate the wins however they might appear. It’s important to share in the wins of your team and make sure everyone understands why the wins are the wins. Ask for feedback and adjust constantly to truly get the iterative wins as a manager that you used to get more often as an IC. And remember it’s not a bad thing to ask yourself “what have I accomplished” routinely and have the length of the list be shorter some days and longer others. You might not have wins everyday but that makes it even more important to recognize them when they do happen.
