1:1 vs 1:N Impact
I became a manager of my first engineering team. I got pulled into team ceremonies and alignment meetings and lots of one on ones. Before I knew it the calendar was full. I was being so productive. I was helping so many people.
New managers default to 1:1 work because it feels like so many of the things we want it to feel like: concrete, responsive, visible, fair, and controllable. 1:N work on the other hand feels abstract, slower, riskier, and sometimes invisible. The work that helps one person immediately often feels more real than the work that helps ten people eventually.
So people over-optimize for the wrong layer of impact without realizing it.
I used to talk a lot, when folks asked me about why I wanted to be a manager, about wanting to exponentially increase my impact. That I would scale my impact on the org through those who reported to me by helping them be better more effective versions of themselves. To some degree I did accomplish this, but mainly by leveling up my engineers as individuals.
When I first took on managing two teams, I didn't scale myself. I was treating having two teams like I had the same attention and bandwidth as back when I had one. The same attendance at meetings, the same cadence of one on ones with direct reports. Nothing had changed except my bandwidth was at an all time low.
That’s the moment I knew this didn’t work.
Not because something broke. Because nothing broke, and that was the warning sign.
Many managers assume scaling only starts when things go wrong. But often the real signal is: everything is working and I still have no time left.
I was running a marathon like it was a sprint.
I went into management wanting to make a 1:N impact but had never actually made the shift.
My calendar made that gap visible. Anyone who looked at my calendar could see how I was operating (or wasn’t). The calendar told the truth about my leadership scope.
No one had ever told me when that transition would be required. I realized the skills that helped me succeed before weren’t the ones I needed next. Being great at supporting individuals is not the same as being effective at leading organizations. I had to stumble into the problem to realize I needed to claw my way back out, one updated meeting invite at a time.
When I finally started scaling differently, my calendar changed. My one on ones got shorter and less frequent. I stopped being the person who solved problems and started being the person who set the conditions for others to solve them. I didn’t have to be in every room or every meeting to know that the strategy I planned was being executed properly. I needed to build a structure and a team to support that. This was the first time I understood that scaling my impact didn’t mean working more. It meant changing what kind of work I was doing.
When I wanted to become a manager I dreamed of how much greater my impact would be if I expanded the potential of all the people who reported to me. Then I started dreaming even bigger. I was planning in terms of systems and repeatable frameworks. That’s when I stopped measuring my effectiveness by how many people I was helping directly and started measuring how well I was truly scaling my impact.
Managers are not evaluated on how helpful they are individually. They’re evaluated on what becomes possible because they exist.
