managing managers | leadership development | people management | delegation | 1 on 1 | feedback | succession planning
What You Will Learn:
- Develop managers deliberately, using the ten competencies from the Gallup and Google research
- Teach delegation through six distinct levels, and recognise micromanagement and seagull management in someone else’s behaviour
- Run a one-to-one with a manager, where the subject is their team rather than their tasks
- Give feedback to someone whose own job is giving feedback, which is a different conversation entirely
- Decide what to pay, when to raise it, and how to keep a manager a competitor is calling
- Build a succession plan with a 9-box grid, so promoting someone does not create a hole
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The Hardest Pivot in Tech: A Raw Look at Managing Managers
Let’s be real—the jump from Individual Contributor to Manager is a hurdle, but the leap from Manager to Managing Managers is a goddamn mountain. I’ve seen countless brilliant Engineering Managers get promoted to Director level only to crash because they tried to use the same playbook that got them there. You can’t just “manage harder” when you’re two steps removed from the code. That’s why I picked up Managing Managers: Leading Leaders and Scaling a Team. I wanted to see if it actually offered job-ready skills or just more corporate buzzwords.
What surprised me most about this course isn’t just the framework—it’s the shift in perspective. When you’re leading leaders, your “product” is no longer the software; it’s the organizational health and the quality of the decisions made by your subordinates. This course digs into the meta-work: how to coach someone whose entire job is coaching. It moves past the basics of people management and enters the realm of organizational architecture. If you’re tired of feeling like a glorified calendar coordinator and want to actually scale a team without losing your mind, this is the deep dive you’ve been looking for.
Prerequisites
This isn’t a “Management 101” course for someone who just got their first direct report. To get the most out of this, you really need to have some “management scars.” I’d say at least 1–2 years of experience leading a team is vital. You should already understand the basics of 1 on 1s and performance reviews. The content is designed for those moving into Director-level roles or Senior EMs who are starting to mentor other leads. You don’t need a specific certification prep background, but a mindset ready for high-level strategy over tactical fire-fighting is non-negotiable.
Skills & Tools Taught
The course doesn’t just talk at you; it provides a toolkit of industry-standard tools and frameworks that you can deploy immediately.
- The 9-Box Grid: A staple for succession planning and talent mapping that helps you visualize who is a future leader and who is just a “solid citizen.”
- Six Levels of Delegation: This was a game-changer. It moves beyond “just trust them” and gives you a vocabulary to define exactly how much autonomy a manager has on a specific project.
- Gallup & Google Competencies: It distills massive amounts of data into ten actionable competencies that actually move the needle on team engagement.
- Retention & Compensation Strategy: You’ll learn the dark art of career growth conversations—specifically how to keep a high-performing manager when recruiters are blowing up their LinkedIn with 30% raises.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
If you’re eyeing a VP of Engineering, Head of Product, or Director of Operations role, the skills here are your ticket. In the tech world, anyone can manage a project, but very few can build a self-sustaining leadership pipeline. Completing this course gives you the real-world projects mindset needed to handle organizational scaling. It’s the difference between being a “manager” and being a “leader of leaders.” From a career growth perspective, showing you have a systematic approach to leadership development makes you infinitely more “promotable” in the eyes of the C-suite.
What Makes This Course Stand Out (The Pros)
- Ending the “Seagull Management” Cycle: We’ve all had that boss who flies in, makes a mess, and flies away. This course gives you a mirror to see if you’re doing that to your own managers and provides the hands-on labs (mentally speaking) to fix it.
- Feedback on Feedback: This is the most underrated part. Giving feedback to a manager about how they give feedback is “Inception-level” management. This course breaks down that specific, awkward conversation better than any HR manual I’ve read.
- The Delegation Framework: The “Six Levels” approach should be mandatory reading. It eliminates the binary of “micromanagement vs. total abandonment,” which is where most beginner to advanced transitions fail.
The Honest Truth (The Cons)
If I have one gripe, it’s that the section on compensation and raises can feel a bit localized. Depending on whether you’re at a bootstrapped startup or a FAANG giant, the “what to pay” advice might need a heavy dose of salt. The principles of the conversation are solid, but don’t expect it to replace your local market data. It’s also a dense course; you can’t just “play it in the background.” If you aren’t taking notes and actively applying the 9-box grid to your current org chart, the value drops significantly.