Anyone else take a manager/team lead job and instantly regret it?
Anyone else take a manager/team lead job and instantly regret it?
I’ve been at my current job for 10 months now, manager who hired me was my manager at last job for like a year. He is pushing me to take a “team lead” job but ive always refused those in every other job ive been in. Seems like theyre always stressed, and like its not worth the headaches. Im very OCD about work and never call in, which my bosses see and are like “omg, youre such a good worker. Youd make a good boss right” which…no. Im super non confrontational and am terrible and social cues lmao.
Im happy just riding out where im at. I get good benefits, already paid well, and have no kids. Why tf add stress?
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Yep, after 5 years at the company and watching as the senior members jumped ship, I thought I could weasel the salary I deserved out of them by stepping up to the plate. Turns out I got the salary I should have had the whole time, but nothing extra considering I was managing 12 people. On top of that, I was also expected to make magic happen whenever the executives pulled their heads out of their asses long enough to realize there were problems. Needless to say, I didn’t finish my 6th year. I regret so many of the decisions I made in my career that year. I should have never showed interest in managing because I could have stayed in my current role and probably been a lifer doing a job I was good at. Instead I jumped ship to a different company that I like less, doing things that bore me to death. So my 2 cents is to stick to being a grunt and avoid the stress and self loathing that comes with being middle management… unless you are into that sort of thing, because many people love ladder climbing into positions they despise for the sake of “career advancement”.
I could have written this exact post, down to most of the same numbers lol.
If you think you'll actually like management (which probably means a lot more meetings, reviewing other people's work and time sheets, and making high-level decisions instead of actually doing any of the work involved) (and also means taking the flak for any screw-ups your subordinates make, trying to implement new procedures in a desperate attempt to make things better but your underlings hate the changes and your bosses are never as impressed as you thought they'd be, and watching other people excel and grow and learn new things doing the stuff you probably got into your industry to do in the first place), then by all means go for it.
I fell for this trap a few times. I was desperate for the pay increase at the time, which go figure never feels like as much as it looked like on paper, but I still needed it anyways.
These days, I keep it very explicit with my bosses that I have no interest whatsoever in doing those roles any more. It might make me a slightly less attractive employee, and it might hamper my career growth to some extent, but it means I get to actually do the thing I've always wanted to do every single day, instead of getting sucked into a bullshit-conjuration position vaguely adjacent to that thing, and I am grateful every day for that.
Also the confrontation thing, yeah big time. Moving up means more crushing downwards, which feels bad no matter what. Either somebody genuinely fucked up, and it's some degree of your fault for not training them right or catching it sooner, or they really did what they thought was right (and may have actually been the right thing) but a customer is mad or your bosses are mad or another department is mad, and you have to discipline them anyways.
You also have to fire people, which is probably the worst interpersonal interaction you can ever have at work, let alone in most areas of life. Again sometimes it's fully justified, and it still sucks, but plenty of times it's something like a layoff where it's "nothing personal, just the bottom line ya know", or it's that the bosses decided that this person needs to be fired for some arbitrary reason you may not even agree with, but you still have to be the one to pull the trigger and ruin this person's day/year. Additionally, you usually can't talk about the reasons with anyone else, so you have to field questions from the rest of your team that are usually good and valid, but you have to explain the away with vague corpo-speak and can't really tell them what's up.
So ya know, if any of that sounds fun, I mean, get checked out, because yikes.
No, it actually sounds like the exact opposite of fun lmao
Congratulations, you have a conscience, and are therefore unsuited for management.