Leading the Work You Didn’t Choose

A few years ago an engineer who was considering the path to management asked me if they could pick my brain about being a manager. I was flattered. It was the first of what would become many conversations I’d have on that topic. The conversation started off great with discussion about the usual early management ideals of servant leadership and wanting to pursue new and exciting challenges. But the part that got me, and the part I’ll never forget, is when this person said to me, “I just want to finally be able to say no.” I almost laughed. Honestly, I might have. “I never get to say no,” I said to the person staring at me in shock. I had to explain to them that saying “no” is rarely an option available to managers in the way people expect.

Here’s the thing this person didn’t yet understand, and it’s something that tends to shock a lot of people when they become managers: Managers don’t gain control. They inherit responsibility for decisions made elsewhere. Most management starts with decisions you didn’t make. 

You either learn this lesson quickly or spend a lot of time fighting decisions you have no control over. The harder part isn’t realizing that. It’s learning how to lead once the decision is already made. In the conversation I had that day, I believe I compared it to improv (thanks Tina Fey’s “Bossypants”!) where the one rule is never to say no. You can say “yes and” or “yes if” or “okay but.” If you had asked me then whether I understood what it meant to not say “no” as a manager, I would have said yes. What I didn’t understand yet was that leadership doesn’t stop when the decision is made. That’s when it starts.

A few months after that conversation, surprising for them, memorable for me, I had just come back to work after my first parental leave. I was adjusting to a whole new role in life, being a mom, and to a team that had changed in my absence. New people had joined the team, others had grown into new roles, features had shipped. Time had continued moving while I was out. I was determined to prove to everyone, including myself, that “I’ve got this.” I was back just in time to finalize the team’s annual roadmap and kick off the new fiscal year. Everything was going great. Look, I could do all the things. But we were only about one month into that roadmap when I got the news. Priorities in the org had changed, and everyone across engineering needed to support them, including my engineering team. Three major initiatives didn’t have a home yet. My team, which was considered more of a supporting team to the core product, would need to take one on. To his absolute credit, my director at the time asked me if I had a preference which one my team took. I asked for a day to bring it to the team.

When I spoke to my team, I didn’t try to sell the change as exciting. I told them the truth. This upheaval wasn’t what anybody asked for. We were all disappointed to see such a radical change to our plans, a major postponement to features we were excited to build and tech debt we were finally going to pay off. But one of three projects in particular had caught my eye. No one in the entire engineering organization had implemented it yet. It was new to everyone, which meant that if we pulled it off, not only would we have delivered an important feature but we’d have shown everyone that it didn’t matter if our team’s expertise lay outside the core product. We were great engineers. Period. If we succeeded, the org wouldn’t remember that we hadn’t chosen the project. They would remember that we delivered it.

That framing mattered more than I realized at the time. I wasn’t trying to convince the team the roadmap change was good news. I was trying to preserve agency inside a decision that had already been made.

And the team agreed. We chose that project, the one that was scary and full of unknowns but also full of opportunity. After nine months and many important lessons later we delivered it - on time! It was an incredible win: for the engineers, for myself, for the company. Handing the feature off to the team who would own it long term was actually incredibly bittersweet for all of us. Somewhere along the way it stopped being the initiative we were assigned and became our project. That was the real success for me as their manager. Not choosing the work. Helping the team make it theirs.

Back when I spoke to that engineer who thought management meant finally being able to say no, I wished they were a little bit right. When my director told me about the change to our roadmap I wished really desperately that I could just say no. But that isn’t the job. Management is not about authority. It’s about stewardship of decisions you didn’t make. Engineers often assume managers choose priorities, approve work, and control direction. Sometimes that’s true. But managers also translate decisions, align teams, absorb disappointment, and create momentum anyway. 

One of the hardest parts of management is enforcing decisions you didn’t make. One of the most important parts is helping your team succeed anyway.

I couldn’t change the decision to upend our roadmap. But I could change how we entered it.