Katie Bauer!

It's one thing to hear that becoming a manager is a career track change, but it's another to live through it. A consequence of this that I didn't expect is having to figure out how the lessons you learned as an IC apply to new contexts

Being able to say no is an important skill for a senior IC, who CAN do a lot of things but still shouldn't do them, for many many reasons. Saying no was a game changing skill for me as an IC, and when I began my people management career, I was determined to teach it to my team

In the grand scheme of things, I did an alright job of this. I had a feel for the beats and lifecycles of DS work and I'd lived through the stages career growth as a DS IC. Essentially, I had a strong sense of where DS adds value so I could tell what was worth saying no to

The problem was, I didn't have this intuition or experience with manager-specific skills. I was nervous and eager to seem competent and important. Taking on more responsibility and more ICs felt like growth, so I agreed to do work and manage people when I had no business to

Sometimes it was because I was too junior a manager to have that kind of skill, sometimes it was because it wasn't something a DS manager should be doing in the first place. In both cases, it left me feeling totally ragged and burnt out

I still think I'm bad at this--at saying no as a manager. The former type of saying no is getting easier, but the latter is an area where I have a lot of growth ahead of me