Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / The Manager Trap of Doing It All
Transcript
- Lucas: There is a specific kind of panic that hits a new manager about three weeks into the role. You look at your backlog, you look at your former peers who are now direct reports, and you realize you are the bottleneck. So what do you do? You pick up the phone, or open the laptop, and you start doing the work yourself because it’s faster if you just handle it. Luna: Right, the hero complex. You think you’re saving the project, but really you’re just signaling that you don’t trust them to finish it. Lucas: Exactly. And it’s not even always about trust. Sometimes it’s pure ego. You spent years being the best coder, or the best salesperson, or the best analyst. Now you have a team that’s moving slower than you used to. It feels like watching someone tie their shoes when you could do it in half the time. But here’s the thing: as a manager, your job isn’t to be the fastest pair of hands anymore. Your job is to make everyone else faster. Luna: So we’re talking about the shift from being an individual contributor to becoming a force multiplier? Lucas: That’s the term. I want to look at a specific example from a mid-sized software company I advised last quarter. They promoted a senior engineer named David to team lead. David was brilliant. He wrote clean code, he understood the architecture deeply, and he hated seeing inefficiency. Within two months, his team’s output didn’t go up; it went down. Everyone started waiting for David to review their pull requests because he’d jump in and rewrite things himself rather than giving feedback. Luna: Because rewriting it himself was faster than explaining the nuance of why his changes were necessary. Lucas: Precisely. And worse, the other engineers stopped trying to solve hard problems. Why bother? David would just fix it anyway. This created a dependency loop. The team became passive, and David became exhausted. By week eight, he was working sixty-hour weeks, stressed out, and wondering why his team wasn’t performing. He wasn’t managing people; he was managing tickets. And in doing so, he accidentally fired his own team’s initiative. Luna: It’s tragic because David thought he was helping. He saw a problem and solved it. He didn’t realize he was solving the wrong problem. Lucas: He was solving the immediate problem, which is the bug or the delay. He wasn’t solving the systemic problem, which is the team’s capability gap. As a manager, you have to accept that short-term pain for long-term gain. If you step in to do the work, you relieve the tension immediately. But you never build the muscle memory for your team. They stay dependent on you forever. Luna: So how do you resist that urge? Because the urge is real. It’s visceral. You see a mistake and you just want to correct it right now. Lucas: I give managers a simple filter. Before you step in to do the task, ask yourself three questions. One: Is this a critical path item that will fail catastrophically if I don’t touch it today? Two: Have I clearly communicated the standard for this task already? Three: Am I doing this because it’s urgent, or because I’m impatient with the quality of the current approach? Luna: Impatience is usually the driver. We underestimate how much learning happens through struggle. Lucas: If the answer to question one is no, and the answer to question two is yes, then you must sit on your hands. You let them struggle. You let them make the mistake. Because that mistake is where the learning happens. If you save them from the mistake, you deny them the lesson. And next time they’ll make the same mistake, and you’ll be even more frustrated. Luna: But what if the mistake costs money? Or loses a client? That fear keeps managers awake at night. Lucas: Then you mitigate risk differently. You don’t do the work for them. You provide scaffolding. Maybe you pair program with them for an hour. Maybe you review their outline before they write the code. Maybe you set up a checkpoint halfway through the day. Scaffolding supports the structure without carrying the weight. Doing the work removes the structure entirely. Luna: Scaffolding is such a good word. It implies temporary support that gets removed once the building can stand on its own. Lucas: Exactly. And most new managers never remove the scaffolding. They keep holding the wall up because they’re afraid it’ll collapse. But if you keep holding it, they never learn to hold it themselves. You create a ceiling on their career, and honestly, on yours. Because if you’re the only one who can do the core work, you can never be promoted further. You’re stuck in the role you’re trying to escape. Luna: That’s the paradox. You try to prove you’re still the best performer, but you end up proving you’re still just an individual contributor wearing a manager title. Lucas: Right. And the metrics change. As an IC, your metric is output. Lines of code, closed deals, resolved tickets. As a manager, your metric is leverage. How many outputs did my team generate while I was focused on strategy, hiring, and removing blockers? If your output goes up but your team’s stagnates, you’ve failed. You’ve traded a high-leverage role for a low-leverage one. Luna: It requires a huge mindset shift. You have to find satisfaction in their success, not your own direct contribution. Lucas: It does. And it’s awkward at first. You watch someone take twenty minutes to send an email that you could do in four. Your brain screams, let me do it. But you have to breathe through that. You have to remind yourself that those twenty minutes are an investment in their future autonomy. If you cut it down to four, you’re robbing them of the practice. Luna: So the goal is to make yourself obsolete in the tactical sense? Lucas: Yes. You want to reach a point where your team doesn’t need you to solve their daily problems. They need you for context, for resources, and for direction. But not for execution. If they come to you for execution, you’re still too close to the keyboard. Luna: How do you know when you’ve crossed that line? When have you actually become a manager? Lucas: When you can take a two-week vacation and the team runs smoother than when you’re there. That’s the ultimate test. If things fall apart when you’re gone, you haven’t built systems. You’ve just built a dependency on your presence. And that’s not leadership; that’s hostage-taking, unintentionally. Luna: Ouch. But true. If they rely on you for everything, you’re not leading them; you’re trapping them. Lucas: Precisely. So, back to David, the software lead. What changed? His director sat him down and showed him the data. Team velocity had dropped thirty percent since his promotion. Customer satisfaction scores dipped. And David’s own overtime hours had doubled. The director asked him one question: Are you enabling your team, or are you replacing them? Luna: That’s a brutal question to hear from your boss. Lucas: It was. But it was also clarifying. David realized he was the problem. He stopped rewriting code. Instead, he started holding weekly code review sessions where he would critique the approach, not the syntax. He taught them how to fish, instead of fishing for them. It took another month. Velocity dipped slightly at first because they were struggling. But by week ten, it surpassed his original solo pace. And this time, it was sustainable. Luna: Because the knowledge was distributed across the team, not hoarded by one person. Lucas: Exactly. Knowledge distribution is resilience. If David leaves, the team survives. If David stays as the sole solver, the team dies with him. Management is about building institutions, not personal empires. Luna: That’s a powerful way to frame it. Institutions versus personal empires. Most new managers don’t think that far ahead. Lucas: They shouldn’t have to. It’s the whole point. You’re paid to build something that lasts beyond your daily attention. If you’re constantly putting out fires, you’re not building anything. You’re just keeping the house from burning down, and eventually, you’ll run out of water. Luna: So the takeaway is: resist the urge to fix it yourself. Provide scaffolding, not solutions. Lucas: Provide scaffolding. Let them build the wall. Your job is to hand them the bricks and check the level occasionally. Don’t lay the bricks for them. Luna: Harder than it sounds, but definitely worth it in the long run. Lucas: It is. And it makes your life easier. Once your team is autonomous, you get your time back. You can finally focus on the strategic stuff that actually moves the needle. Instead of being buried in the weeds, you’re looking at the horizon. Luna: Which is probably why you got promoted in the first place. Lucas: Yeah, exactly. To look at the horizon. Not to dig the hole in the foreground. Luna: Before we wrap, I want to mention that if this conversation has helped you navigate a tricky career moment or management challenge, we truly appreciate your support. A couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these shows going and allows us to keep producing ad-free content for you. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's F. E. X. I. N. G. O. Lucas: Yeah, it really helps sustain the research and the deep dives we try to do. So thank you if you’re able to chip in. Luna: Anyway, back to the topic. Do you think companies do enough to prepare people for this mental shift before they promote them? Lucas: Not really. Most promotion packages include a raise and a title, but very little training on the actual mechanics of delegation. They assume that if you were good at the job, you’ll be good at managing the people doing the job. Which, as we’ve seen, is a dangerous assumption. Luna: Right. They promote the best player to coach, but they don’t teach them how to coach. Lucas: Exactly. They treat management like a natural talent rather than a craft. But it is a craft. And like any craft, it requires practice, failure, and correction. If we don’t give new managers the tools to avoid the hero trap, we’re setting them up to fail. Luna: So the responsibility falls on us, the listeners, to actively fight that urge when we slip into old habits. Lucas: It does. And to remember that patience is a leadership skill. Not impatience. Patience. Letting others grow at their own pace, even when it’s frustrating to watch. Luna: A slow climb for them might be a steady rise for the whole team. Lucas: Now that’s a perspective worth keeping in mind the next time you feel the itch to jump in and do it yourself.