You need to delegate tasks, it's part of your job. Train the new hires, add them to your project and let them do the majority of the work. And you shouldn't work on weekends and holidays.
This so many times. This has been my journey to becoming a competent manager in the past year. What’s helped is framing it as: if I was someone’s manager after a year have they grown more or less than if I wasn’t there. We grow through being challenged and trying on new responsibilities. Delegating running meetings, scoping larger amounts of work, giving presentations— whatever. If you do all these things yourself you’re both making more work for yourself and keeping growth opportunities from your reports. The positive feedback loop is your team gets more done AND when you see someone go from struggling to crushing it at something you used to do it’s incredibly rewarding.
Another lesson hard learned was realizing it’s not my job to do everything like an IC. And especially not my job to personally fix all people problems. I’m merely just here to guide and coax along the right path. And give lots of specific feedback on what’s good and what’s not so good.
A hope maybe this helps the grandparent poster. Your post resonates heavily with where I was at a year or two ago. Being a manager ain’t easy. I’d argue much more so if you were a really strong IC.
I wish that this helped. But my job title is programmer, and managing the 5 other people is just a side task. And there's so much work that the team is always split on several different projects. So in theory delegation sounds like a good idea, but I don't have spare capacity to delegate to. Nor do I have control of which projects we prioritize, those are coming from the CEO and CTO, and head of product -- one major project each.
I've known since university I'm bad at delegating things. Do I just have to learn by doing it?
Finally, what do you mean by IC? I'm pretty sure I'm not an integrated circuit, but I've never gotten the head X-ray to check for sure.
Personally I think I would write down your first paragraph or something similar to it and have a conversation with your manager using that as your guide. I’d be looking for clarity on what your priorities and responsibilities really are. E.g. does managing come first or programming? And if push comes to shove is one ok to drop for the other?
Another topic might be communicating the lack of bandwidth for the work. Maybe there’s scope creep or too much work on the plate and some needs to be dropped.
As far as learning delegation, yeah, that’s how I did it: trial and error. For me finding really competent people who I trust and who want opportunities to grow and take on new responsibilities has helped a lot as a kind of prerequisite.
And yeah sorry IC = Individual Contributor, i.e. not managing anyone.
You feel responsible for the project, that's normal and i would definitely pick you as a colleague. But you have to let go some of this responsibility; start being responsible for the delivery of the project and the internal goals, leave the technical work to the team. Instead of assigning tasks to yourself, assign them to your team members. Start with low priority tasks and move forward. If the team is competitive and the project is good, they will shine and you will feel better that you have guided them. It's definitely not a walk in the park, and at least you will fulfil your role as a team lead.
