Becoming a Manager

I

Learning What It Means to Be a Manager

To tell the story of the new managers’ experiences properly, we must start where they started, by asking what it means to be a manager and what a manager does. In this part of the book we consider how the new managers came to understand that the managerial role was distinct from the individual contributor role and how they began to embrace it.

The new managers learned through experience what it meant to be a manager—first, from their prior experience as individual contributors (observing their managers at work) and then, from their interactions with others while performing the functions and activities of management. Throughout their first year on the job, the managers reframed their understanding of what ...