What’s your goal as a manager? What should be the result of your work? How do you define success? How do you make an impact?

Being a manager, the answer to those questions is not that simple.

How do I make an Impact?

It’s usually easier for Individual Contributors. At least on the surface. As an IC you are expected to deliver. Work on your tasks, write code, fill reports, whatever is needed. Then you mark it as done and voila! Impact!

Well, not really. Delivering work and making an impact is not always the same. Still, it’s easier to draw the line between the daily work of an IC to the impact she makes.

What about managers? A manager is a senior position. So it’s expected that you will have a significant impact! Much bigger than an IC. But how? And what do we even consider a manager’s impact?

Inexperienced managers often take the wrong path here. They want to achieve more by working more. They have a new role but stick to old habits. They try to make an impact by jumping straight to the action and making more work themselves.

And it seems logical! After all, that’s what worked before, right? That’s what got them promoted. So they have to do it again, but harder! Deliver more code. Finish more tasks. Be the manager and the smartest person in the room.

And usually, they fail.

Why?

Because being a manager is a completely different role. What got you here won’t get you there. Your goals are different. What is expected of you is different. And it’s no longer about you. Now it’s all about your team.

The power of many

There is a limit to what you can do as a single person. You might be an outstanding engineer but you have just two hands, just one head and just one keyboard. You have to sleep, you have to eat and optionally maintain personal hygiene.

To deliver more and to make a bigger impact, you need other people. And this is where you have to become a manager.

Ask yourself, what will make a bigger impact? A single person or a team of 5 people?

The answer is clear, right? But it’s not just about the number.

What will make a bigger impact? A focused and efficient team of 3 people, working on a single, well-planned goal or a team of 6, ad-hoc switching between several, unconnected topics?

Here precisely lays your goal. This is how you make an impact as a manager. You create and lead high-impact teams.

Easier said than done.

What’s an impact?

In simple terms, the impact is a change. An effect of your work on the company, on the product and the business. Difference between “before” and “after”.

A lot of work is not the same as a big impact. You might deliver one simple feature that perfectly nails the market’s demand and brings a lot of revenue. That’s the high impact. You may also spend months and quarters rewriting your system to a new fancy framework just for the sake of it. That’s the low impact.

Yes, I know it hurts.

The thing that differentiates winners from losers is knowing what to work on to maximise their impact.

Impact makes people happy

Morale is an often overlooked aspect of a team’s impact.

People want their work to have a meaning. They want to know if the tears and sweat they’ve put into their work are having some effect on the world. They want to see an impact!

All the high-performing and highly motivated teams I’ve seen were delivering impactful work. All the poorly performing and demotivated teams were delivering low-impact work. Everything else is just a decoration.

Help your team deliver impactful work and you will have highly engaged and motivated people. Works every time.

Manager’s impact

The key aspect of making an impact as a manager is your mindset.

You need to embrace systems thinking. You need to be able to see and understand the whole picture. The intricate mosaic of people, technology and everything around them, with their dynamic web of connections that affect each other constantly. See the system as a whole.

What is slowing you down? Why do simple things take so much time? What’s affecting the morale of your teammates? What works well and where do you struggle?

In the same way, you analyse and debug the complex technical systems, you need to be able to analyse and debug the system of your team.

This understanding will show you why some things are happening. What’s even more important, it will help you to find levers that you can pull to change the situation.

Understand the root cause

Let’s say your team is plagued by frequent production incidents. Every day your people are firefighting. Stresses. Burned. Frustrated. You fix one incident but more come again and again.

What can you do, as a manager?

Well, you can jump into action, hands-on, start handling incidents, fix issues, writing post-mortems. Will it help? Maybe. Maybe, with your knowledge and experience, you will help the team to deal with incidents faster and write better fixes. But is it really significantly changing the situation?

You are still plagued with incidents. There is still some problem in the system.

What if instead of jumping straight to action, you focus on understanding?

Why do you have so many incidents? Is this the problem with the quality of the code the team writes? Are some of the services unstable? Is it caused by some 3rd party integrations? Or maybe there is some more intricate problem in cross-team alignment that’s causing compatibility issues between implementations?

Dig deeper. Understand the root cause and find a way to fix it. You will eliminate a whole category of issues! That’s a proper impact for a senior position! 👏

Plan for Impact

You might have the most efficient team in the entire world that is churning code like a well-oiled machine, but if they are working on poorly planned goals, their impact is still low. And they know it. And they are probably frustrated as hell.

What can you do as a manager to plan for impact?

Start by asking yourself some important questions. Do you have clear goals? Is your team focused on those goals or is it constantly busy with other things? Are those goals aligned with your team’s vision and purpose? Because you have a team’s vision, right? How do you know your team’s work has an impact? What does the impact mean for your team? How do you measure it?

Once you know the answers to those questions, work with your Product Manager and stakeholders to define goals that will maximise the impact of your team. Work with your team to determine the most impactful technical improvements you should make. Try to replace very general and vague “tech debt reduction” with well-defined technical investments that yield concrete results. And keep them focused on those goals all the time. Be ruthless in eliminating distractions.

Remember that predicting impact is hard. And it’s ok. The important characteristic of high-impact teams is the quick iteration process. Ship frequently, measure the impact and adjust your plans. Work that is not delivered on production, has zero impact, regardless of the technical excellence or time spent on it.

Impact by growth

An often overlooked aspect of a manager’s impact is the growth of your team.

Investing in your people, coaching them and giving them opportunities to grow and learn new skills can, in the long run, result in a truly amazing increase in the team’s impact.

Such an approach requires sometimes sacrificing short-term efficiency for long-term gains. Giving your less experienced people a chance to work on complex topics, above their current level, means that the task will take more time to complete or will not be done perfectly. It will also consume your time, needed to coach and support your people.

Yes, you could do it yourself faster, but smart managers understand that a small delay is a small price to pay, for the growth of your people.

Tip of the iceberg

All this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are so many other ways you can make an impact as a manager. Growing your teammates and keeping them engaged and motivated. Improving cross-team collaboration. Improving team’s efficiency with good ways of working and processes. Managing team’s priorities and juggling stakeholders’ requests.

There are countless places where you can apply your system thinking skills, understand underlying processes and find ways to make a positive impact.

Keep your hands dirty

You might think that I advise you to avoid engaging yourself in the team’s daily work and just sit high above the ground, on your magnificent ivory tower and mumble something about systems and flows.

Quite the opposite!

Being hands-on, and participating in your team’s daily work is a key aspect of staying in touch with your team. It’s needed to fully understand your team’s daily struggles.

And it will still be on you to make sure that the improvements you introduce are actually applied. You will still get your hands dirty.

What I’m emphasising, is that you should not try to out-code your ICs. You are a manager, results of your work are measured by the outcome of your teams, not your direct actions. By embracing this mindset, you will be able to deliver an incomparably bigger impact.

Impact worthy of your role.

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