This little tip is intended specially for the folks who recently moved into a Manager role from an individual contributor or a technical engineer position. You now have people reporting in to you. So, how do you deal with your direct reports ?
Let us take a step back and look at the reason for your promotion to the Manager role. Why were you promoted ? In most cases, your stellar performance as an individual contributor or technical resource played a significant part in your elevation. And, your performance as a technical resource either as a developer or a tester would have occurred mostly by dealing with your tasks in an "object oriented" manner.
Let us take a step back and look at the reason for your promotion to the Manager role. Why were you promoted ? In most cases, your stellar performance as an individual contributor or technical resource played a significant part in your elevation. And, your performance as a technical resource either as a developer or a tester would have occurred mostly by dealing with your tasks in an "object oriented" manner.
What I mean by “object oriented” in relation to tasks is treating different tasks / work entities as objects or modules that have a defined interface for interactions and for the most part exhibiting a black-box attribute that hides their internal complexities. By organizing your work in such a way that you abstract out and deal with the various tasks as distinct black-boxes with a specific public interface to deal with, you make your tasks simpler and easier to handle. Handling complex code or applications as a set of modules interacting with each other via interfaces promotes efficiency and keeps things demarcated clearly. This works well when working with Software development or testing.
However, when a similar concept is applied to people, things take a different turn. Coming from an individual contributor position, it is easy to apply the principles that worked well earlier to the new role. People however, cannot be viewed as distinct black-boxes; their work life cannot be seen in isolation from what happens outside of work; just by having people assigned responsibilities does not mean that they will be able to handle them; each person needs to be handled uniquely and deserves exclusive focus and attention; to perform well as a manager, it is essential to realize a basic precept of managing - people cannot be modularized or commoditized.
