Sooner or later in your manager journey, one of your ICs will express their interest in pursuing management as the next career step.
Most likely, when that happens, the only such role on your team would already be taken: by you. While you can’t immediately resign and have the person in question get a new title, there are ways to help them prepare for the next opportunity, one of which could be by having them manage a few of their peers as a team lead.
In this talk, Anna shars the learnings from growing two team leads within her org, where the change ended up being a win-win-win situation for her, the teams, and the new team leads. Anna covers the steps she took with her team leads to help them get started in the role: forming teams, getting the leads trained and mentored (Anna’s focus was on giving and receiving feedback, having difficult conversations, and overall creating a set of behaviors expected from leads), making announcements, and actually transitioning into the new team structure. Anna will also talk about ways to grow the leads’ visibility in the organization beyond initial responsibilities, and some mistakes she made with the steps above. Most of the ideas from this talk also apply to the process of training a successor for a manager.
