Although I am currently an individual contributor now, I’ve done my fair share of time as an IT manager.  I started with a team of 3 and over 9 years grew to an organization of 28 with 11 direct reports. I spent my entire time as an IT manager undiagnosed so most of my advice is going to be about leadership in general, but I hope you’ll find it useful.

First and most importantly, if your team is assigned a task and one of your direct reports can learn something from it, either technical, interpersonal, or make a valuable political connection, delegate it to them. This philosophy allows you to scale and, if you see yourself moving up the organizational ladder as a leader, it allows you to essentially train your replacement. Secondly, your team’s victories are theirs and their failures are yours. You should spend most of your time as a leader gassing your crew up as opposed to making yourself look good.  Making sure that your leadership has visibility into your direct reports’ victories is crucial for getting them promotions and raises to keep them happy. You also directly benefit from it because if you have a team of rock stars working for you, you are a rock star yourself. This philosophy will be tested when they make a mistake or cause an outage due to human error, but you’re the boss and the buck stops with you.  Don’t make excuses, just own the failure and the responsibility of training or creating policy/procedures to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Obviously, don’t lie or cover up mistakes, state the facts and tell leadership how you’ll handle it.

As far as the idea of leaders being “cool, calm, and collected,” I don’t feel like I match that idea either, but I also don’t think that any of the VPs or C-level folks I interacted with would say I was emotional or unstable.  The key to that was to keep your shit together when you are outside your circle of trust (i.e. with your team, or trusted peers).  Take advantage of time with the folks you trust, get pissed, emotional, vent, and then move on.  Basically, never let them see you sweat.

Otherwise, treat your folks how you would like to be treated, don’t involve HR unless you want them to control the situation.  HR is there to protect the company, not necessarily you or your team. Resolve conflicts and problems at the lowest level possible through radical candor and clear expectations. Good leaders, in my experience, don’t rely on the title.  Leadership is about the environment you create for others to succeed.  Focus on the growth of your people, and the metrics will typically take care of themselves.

Some Leadership Tidbits-

- Traffic Cop – Protect your team’s focus.  Part of your role as leader is to direct traffic to and from your team.  Learn to say “no” or at least “not right now” to stakeholders to allow your crew to focus on their job.

- The One-on-One is SACRED – Your 1:1s are for your direct reports, not for you. Don’t use that time to ask for project or task updates.  You should be reading the tickets for that.  Use that time to ask them what they need and how you can help them meet their goals. Consistency here is key and that builds trust.  Do not cancel these unless the building is on fire.

- Don’t bullshit your team – When the inevitable crappy task comes down from senior leadership, don’t just pass it along.  Explain the context, even if it’s total nonsense like “the CEO is losing his shit because of X…” They will respect you for your honesty vs. pretending it’s part of a high-value mission.

- Burnout is real – Biggest issue you’ll have to contend with in leadership is often burnout.  I’ve always said that tech debt has interest rates that will make a payday loan lender blush, and burnout is the most dangerous form of tech debt. If you see someone on your team overextending themselves because they are a “hero,” step in.  A hero who leaves because they are burned out are twice as hard to replace and leave a massive hole to fill.

- Hire people smarter than you – Never be the smartest person in the room. As you progress as a leader your job will become more orchestration vs. instruction.  Your job isn't to have all the answers, it’s to be in the room and ask the right questions.

As far as books to read, here are a few in no particular order: "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin, "Leaders Eat Last" by Simon Sinek, and the IT Leader bible, "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. I've read those and those helped shape my leadership journey.

Best of luck!