The New Manager’s Survival Guide

Great work leads to promotions -- and promotions from development to management come with more than increases in responsibility. While they're often awarded based on mastery of one skill set, they require you to learn a whole new one. It's a leap made more challenging by the fact that googling "drush commands for management" gets you nothing.

During this session, we'll talk about adjusting from life as a practitioner (a developer, a designer, a UXer, a PM…) to life as a manager, including:

• Avoiding the pacesetting leader trap by setting realistic expectations for both the people you supervise and yourself.
• Getting comfortable with the shift from “buddy” to “manager.”
• Balancing your roles as both a mentor who coaches and advises, and a manager who will sometimes bear bad news -- both organizational and performance-related.
• Protecting your team from outside threats, but not from the consequences of their own actions.
• Managing up to negotiate for your team, get organizational support, and maintain good lines of communication.
• Investing time in people, not projects.

This session is targeted toward new managers and practitioners considering management who are looking for insights into overcoming common challenges facing new managers. We'll talk about the stumbling blocks we've encountered in our own careers and how we've navigated them, in the context of managing a 20-person technology team at a DC agency as director and associate director.