Personal Change Management

Despite the risk of sounding like an arrogant spoiled brat, I'll write this anyway. I have realized that moving from a developer role into management isn't just dancing on rose petals. And if you still try to participate in the development work, you experience brand new problems.

On one hand you feel like a member of the team. You participate in the work and you might even be good at it. And you know that it's value adding work. But due to your other duties you constantly feel that you are not doing enough. And you can't pair work as much you would like to, because it's rather time consuming. (Although I think the results are usually better than when working alone.)

On the other hand, you have your new management duties. In my case it means both being a supervisor and a Product Owner. A lot of coordination and simply communicating with other people are needed. I need to maintain the Product Backlog and sometimes even have unpleasant conversations.

I feel that upper management and the rest of the organization (and probably in the end even my team) would like me to concentrate on my managerial work. From systems point of view I understand it. The body benefits more if the lungs don't try to act like blood cells or brains as fingers. And I consciously try to do that. But it's a bit unnatural and I still feel like I'm pulled in two directions.

I'm not sure how common or rare this is, but I've perceived that I'm not the only one suffering from this problem. As a conclusion, I think the problem is mostly just between ears. When a person changes his/her role, it is more often that (s)he isn't able and/or willing to let go of the old duties. Unlearning is hard. But if you want to initiate change, you have to start from yourself.