No One Trains You To Be a Manager

One of the stranger surprises about becoming a manager is how little structured support there can be once you get there. Maybe if you were lucky, as an engineer you had a manager who offered some coaching when you told them you wanted to become a manager. But it’s not like engineering where you took classes or honed your skills over years of practice before someone paid you to do it. You never took a class on how to manage people. There’s no real training to prepare you for how to be a manager. 

A totally normal conclusion to draw is: well my manager will teach me how to manage. By the time I actually became a manager, my boss couldn’t be my mentor. They could be my professional coach just like any manager should be, but their time is limited and their motivation in my development had to fit business needs as well as my personal goals. The conversations I could have with the person rating my performance could never be completely unfiltered. Plus once I became a manager I was expected to be a manager - not a manager in training. The expectation was that I was already performing at that level not below it. 

I had to learn on the job and I had to learn quickly because management comes with increased scope and impact. Getting it wrong now would happen on a much bigger platform.

I turned to books for a lot of early management guidance. If someone else has already learned these lessons, why not learn from them faster? There were some leadership style workshops a couple of employers offered. But that was really it. And a lot of those books and workshops were truly helpful. But what I wanted and often needed was less playbooks and more guidance for the specific situations I found myself in or the dynamics unique to my organization.

As an engineer, most people enter the workforce with a certain baseline of engineering knowledge but over the course of your career you learn predominantly from peers. You learn by reviewing code together, watching others solve problems. Once you transition to management, you go from being on a team and learning on the job but with lots of support and oversight from your peers to a much more solo experience. Managers typically have fewer peers, fewer shared problems, and fewer safe practice spaces. That doesn’t mean management is unsupported work. It does mean the support structures change, and most of them become ones you have to build intentionally instead of inheriting automatically.

As a solution to this exact scenario, one recommendation I encountered was leaning into your “first team” of managers or those few who report to the same leader you do. I used to love that advice. As a newer manager it felt extremely comforting to think I could recreate some of the team dynamic I had been missing when I first transitioned into leadership. Having the recommendation point to an easily identifiable group was a bonus. 

Sometimes though this isn’t the built in solution we need. Maybe you can’t go to the managers closest to you hierarchically. Are they people you feel safe being vulnerable with? Are you all vying for the same opportunities? Do they want to be on a first team with you?

Those first team manager relationships do matter. They’re essential partners in the work. But they aren’t always the people you turn to first when you’re trying to figure out how to grow as a manager.

The managers I’ve learned the most from over time haven’t always been the ones closest to me in the org chart. They’ve been the ones willing to share their experiences openly or compare notes. Sometimes they help me — advice, perspective, support when something doesn’t go the way I expected. Other times I’m able to help them in return. They’re the people I reach out to first when I’m trying to make sense of something new.

Not only did I discover there was limited structured learning once I became a manager, but the difference in isolation was a serious adjustment. The higher you go the more that isolation is a factor. I couldn’t turn to the team I was managing and tell them what a hard day I just had with performance conversations, or a difficult chat with the VP. Having a network of other managers I could turn to combat that feeling in a way that made the job feel more sustainable - and usually even more fun. 

You don’t get to choose who your peer managers are. 

But you can choose who you learn from.

You can choose who you watch closely. Who you ask questions of. Who you reach out to after a difficult conversation. Who you pattern yourself after when you’re not sure what the right move is.

Early in management especially, that network matters more than people admit. 

One of my favorite mentees who became a manager last year told me recently that he’s finally starting to reach out to other managers outside his immediate peer group. He said it’s made a huge difference in how he approaches the role. He sounds less like someone trying to survive day to day inside one small space and more like someone operating as part of the organization’s leadership team.

That shift is subtle, but it matters. Those relationships don’t just provide advice and support. They change how you understand the organization itself and where your work fits inside it.

Building that network is one of the first real leadership skills most managers develop, whether anyone tells them that’s what they’re doing or not.