Mastering Leadership: Your Definitive Guide to Leading the Leaders
What is Second-Line Management All About?
“What is my job now? How should my day look?” asked my coachee, who recently completed their transition to managing managers, rather than individual contributors. And “When should my previous reports, now skip-level reports, come to me?” he continued.
After following the change communication playbook we discussed in a previous session, he was ready to update his routine but wasn’t sure where to focus and why.
His questions brought back memories from my own journey into second-line management. So, I paused to reflect on what I learned from that change in my career, and after sharing it with him, I documented my thoughts and advice to help you master the same transition.
My Journey to Managing Managers
Upon leaving for maternity leave with my second child, I handed off the remains of my 25-person team, who reported directly to me, to a promising manager I had recently hired. The first part already reported to a newly appointed manager I had bet on and groomed for a few months.
I courageously gave away my babies — read: my teams — and stepped away to deliver a real baby to the world.
The following five months of maternity leave kept me busy. At first, I was filled with worries about the awaited baby and how it would impact our family. Later, I was occupied with sleepless nights, breastfeeding challenges, and surviving as a parent of two young children.
As with my firstborn, I was ecstatic to return to work. I was greeted with a heartwarming “welcome back” event that reminded me how lucky I was to have such work peers. And then... I was ready to jump back to work.
But, alas! What was my job now? Before I left, I helped the inexperienced manager ramp up and prepared the experienced manager to take over. Now that they both “survived” 5 months without me, what was my job? Am I even needed? My calendar was alarmingly empty.
I decided to start with what I called “project reviews”: meet with each team to discuss the products and projects they are working on so I can gain a holistic understanding of the current state.
The review's content included product strategy, metrics (for launched products/features), challenges, upcoming launches, team effectiveness—how they execute—and cross-functional collaboration.
The participants attending the review were cross-functional leaders — product manager, user experience, engineering manager, program manager and tech leads.
Leaning on my critical skills, I found several areas that required my intervention and started working through them.
I remember learning about a project that sprouted while I was away with a strategy that barely fit into our organization. I wasn’t sure the project was set up for success, and I took the action item to verify with my leadership that they genuinely understood the strategy and blessed it.
Another issue was a product that “stuck” in fish food (alpha testing) for too long. It was launched in fish food before my maternity leave, and while I delivered a new human being, they forgot to expand to the next phase—dog food (beta testing). These are just two examples.
I spent the following years as a second-line manager—manager of managers, managing 25–30 employees through direct managers—before I leaped at the next challenge (managing managers of managers—recursion much?).
Since employees tend to see managers as useless overhead, I spend time defining, articulating and trying to deliver value to my team and company. What you see below is designed to do that.
To learn more about the differences between first and 2nd line managers, read this.
Where Do Managers of Managers Spend Their Time?
Strategy:
- [For engineers] Tech strategy: They are often involved in the technical strategy for the organization. That includes choosing the tech stack the team develops in when to rewrite products or modules, etc.
- People strategy: They need to think about when to ask to hire people, help junior managers manage low performers and terminate them if required, review the team's skills and talents, and identify gaps and mitigations.
- Process strategy: As mentioned before, second-line managers can set an organizational bar regarding quality and processes. They look across teams to understand what is working and what isn’t, and they might copy processes from one well-operating team to another or apply something they believe is best for all teams.
- Product strategy: Products and features drive the company's impact. As managers become senior, they have wider and more evolved viewpoints on how to create value for the company, and they usually partner with product managers and user experience to influence the roadmap.
- Priorities: you help set and communicate org-wide priorities.
Cross-functional interactions
- Create strong partnerships: While front-line managers are usually partnered with product, program and user experience peers, those functions often work with more than a single front-line manager, which makes them a closer partner to the 2nd line manager.
- Foster and facilitate good interactions with teams: 2nd-line managers utilize their strong understanding of people and interpersonal communications skills to help organic teams work well together.
Organic teams usually refer to cross-functional groups of engineers, product managers, user experience managers, and project managers who deliver on software projects. - Provide input on behalf of their team: for example, engineering managers can explain what engineers can deliver for the product needs based on skills and tech stack abilities.
Developing reports (front-line managers)
The better the managers under you are, the more you can scale: take on more work/people and produce more value. This is a great place to invest in.
Cross-pollination and economies of scale across their org
- Across teams: since they are overarching several teams, managers can identify gaps and successes and work to fix or copy to other parts of their organization.
- Across individuals (indirects): Second-line managers develop knowledge and understanding of their indirects and then use them to make connections, create opportunities, or reposition people. For example:
- Suggest and facilitate mentoring engagement that will help junior team members develop while offering leadership opportunities for the senior ones.
- If one team has an influx of people with a certain skill set and another team lacks that skill set, they can trigger a team switch.
When Should Your Now Skip Reports Approach You?
As a manager of managers, you want to build credibility and trust with your organization's members to enable them to come to you with critical issues.
Be sure to monitor what makes team members skip their managers and come to you and teach the managers how to resolve the issues they can. Otherwise, they will become obsolete, and you will spend too much time acting as a front-line manager.
Generally, people should come to you when:
- They need to flag something: ethical concerns, a challenging interaction with someone in your reporting chain, etc.
- Team direction: remember you have a broader viewpoint than their manager.
- Feedback and career development: Second-line managers are usually more experienced, which means their feedback is often different from that of the direct manager. If indirects come to you too frequently for feedback, it signals a skill gap or manager mistrust.
- Manager feedback: this is very important and something you want to cultivate with indirect and their managers.
As a 2nd line manager, you have very few touchpoints with the team. You don’t get a lot of first-hand observations on how the managers under you manage their teams. Sure, you’ll have weekly conversations where the managers share what they do or ask for guidance, but that doesn’t offer much data.
You’d want to hear how their people experience their work so you can offer high-quality, actionable feedback.
Second-line managers suffer the challenges of middle managers. They are pure overhead, not the ones directly doing the work, nor the top or bottom managers. They must explore all ways of adding value.
The most common ways to do that are by supporting the managers under them—relaying everything they learned about being effective front-line managers—and by fostering team cohesion and driving effectiveness—looking holistically across teams to debug what is missing and what is working and then fixing that.
Tips for Successful Transition into Leading Leaders
- Define the outcomes you want to see and let the managers find out how to fulfill them. This will help give them autonomy and avoid micromanaging them.
- Invest in the managers under you: Your foundation for scaling further is helping them be the best they can. Show, don’t only tell: I believe in teaching and sharing specific examples of how you dealt with certain situations in the past.
- Ensure you add value - don’t become pure overhead. The best way to do that is by making a point to help the teams and managers under you. Ask for feedback and how to support them, listen and adapt.
How was your journey from front-line manager to second-line? What is your one piece of advice for those facing that transition?
I offer leadership coaching, book our first chat, I’d love to meet and start helping you.
