The Rookie Manager

The career switch nobody is talking about.

Fresh out of the Navy, at my first startup, I told the CTO his shop was running on anarchy.

No owners. No target dates. I offered to help build sth where the delivery mattered more than any one of us.

He didn’t blink. “I call the shots here. We move on urgency, not systems. The moment we run on systems, we’re not a startup anymore.”

Never forgot that answer. People in tech fear systems for two reasons. They think a system means slowing down. And underneath, they fear a system will take away their power.

I’ve sat on both sides of that table since. A crew of 20 at sea, engineering orgs of hundreds on land. And everywhere I go, the same character keeps walking into my office.

The rookie manager.

You know him. Maybe you were him. You were great at the work, someone handed you a team, and you quietly realized nobody trained you for any of this. The first day you lead, the job changes underneath you, and most of what made you excellent stops being the point. Nobody says that out loud. So the rookie spends a year assuming he’s failing at his old job instead of starting a new one.

Because that’s what this is. Not a promotion. A career change, into a bigger arena with bigger problems and more leverage than you’ve ever had. And for a lot of excellent people, the wrong move anyway.

I wrote a book about that switch. The Rookie Manager. Took me 25 years to earn the pages.

It runs on six forces you hold in tension every day, all at once. Do or Enable. Effort or Confrontation. Heroics or Systems. Said or Heard. Now or Next. Serve or Claim.

One warning, so we understand each other: this is not a checklist, because management is not a checklist, and every person you manage needs a different one. The approach that motivates one person insults the next. A manager isn’t someone who runs a procedure. A manager reads a room full of people who each need sth different, and responds. If you came for management in ten easy steps, I’d rather tell you now than take your money later.

The full book lands in September.

Part I is free today. All nine chapters, the whole decision before the title lands. Your email, and it’s yours.

Link in the first comment.

If someone handed you a team this year, I wrote this for you first. If you’re the one deciding who gets a team, you might need it more.

Serve fully. Claim fairly.

#leadership #management #CTO #newmanagers #engineering