Let me start with the thing nobody tells you when you are chasing a management role. You might get told you are not cut out for it, and they might even be right at the time, and it still will not matter in the end.
For years I wanted to be a manager. It ran in my family, and I made no secret of it. I was an analyst, good at the work, and I told everyone around me that I wanted to lead. I tried, internally, more than once. I did not get it. One of the rounds came with a piece of feedback I still remember word for word: I had an analyst profile, an operations profile, not a management one. Too in-the-weeds. Too hands-on.
That feedback was not wrong. It just was not permanent.
I became a manager by leaving
I did not get promoted into management. I got rescued into it, almost by accident.
A supervisor I had become friends with left for another company. We had celebrated his new job over drinks, and I genuinely did not see what was coming. A while later he got promoted to manager there, and he called me to take the coordinator seat he was leaving behind.
So my first management job was not leading people I already knew at a company where I was the expert. It was the opposite. New company. New product. People I had never met. I knew exactly one person in the building, and that was my new boss.
At the time it felt terrifying. In hindsight, it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me, and here is why.
If I had become a manager at my old company, I would have kept doing the work. I knew the product cold, so I would have jumped on every problem myself. I would have been a player-coach who never stopped playing. Instead, I landed somewhere I knew nothing, surrounded by people who knew far more than I did. I had to delegate. Not because I had read that good managers delegate, but because I literally could not do their jobs.
The feedback said I was too operational to lead. The cure turned out to be a job where being operational was not even an option.
If you are a first-time manager who got promoted inside your own team, here is my one piece of unsolicited advice. Pretend you do not know how to do the work. Delegate like you just walked in the door. Your instinct to “just do it yourself” is the thing most likely to hold both you and your team back.
The mistake I still think about
I will give you the one that still stings.
My first real firing, the whole process from start to finish, mine to own, was someone the team had high hopes for. I had been told he was brilliant. And he was sharp. But for support specifically, he was not the right fit. He did not communicate well, with the team or with customers, and it caused problems constantly. His ticket volume was good, but the quality was below where it needed to be. A big share of his customers came back. Unhappy. Frustrated. Landing on his teammates. The rework piled up, and so did the friction.
My mistake was not the decision. It was how long I took to make it, and how soft I was the whole way there.
I did not want to fire him. He had joined chasing a real career dream, and I did not want to be the person who ended it. So I gave feedback, and tried to coach him, and tried again, and again. The friction with the team only grew.
And here is the part I got most wrong. My feedback was so cushioned it did not read as feedback at all. I was not used to delivering hard messages, so I softened everything. He looked at his numbers, saw the volume, and concluded he was doing great. He had no idea he was in trouble. When the end came, it landed as a shock, because I had spent months protecting his feelings instead of giving him the truth he could have actually used.
That is the lesson I would tattoo on every new manager. Softened feedback is not kindness. It is cowardice wearing kindness as a costume. Being vague does not protect people. It robs them of the one thing that might have helped, which is a clear, honest shot at fixing it, early enough to matter.
What all that studying could not teach me
Here is a confession that runs against the usual new-manager story. I did not get blindsided by the rookie illusions. I had studied for years. I had worked next to managers, coordinators, and a director every single day. I sought out mentorship. I had a pretty accurate picture of what the job was before I ever held it. The classic “I had no idea management was like this” moment? I mostly skipped it.
What studying could not prepare me for was the human weight.
You can read every book on leadership and still not know what to do when someone is crying in a one-on-one, because a piece of feedback hit hard, or because something is falling apart at home and it is bleeding into their work. I have sat across from people carrying real family problems, and the honest truth is that sometimes there is nothing you can fix. I hold The Servant close. I want to serve my team, I want to help. But some months you cannot. You can only be present. Sitting with that helplessness is harder than any tactical part of the job.
Then there is the loneliness, which no one really warns you about. As an analyst, you are friends with everyone. As a manager, a distance appears. You are holding information you cannot share. People are a little more careful around you. It has gotten better over time, and at my current company I am genuinely close with my team, but a line still has to exist. I can be your friend and the person who has to give you hard feedback. Both. That separation is not coldness. It is the job.
But the same wiring that makes the lows heavy makes the highs unforgettable. Not long ago I got a message from someone who had worked with me over a year earlier, at a company I had already left. She had just been promoted, and she told me I was one of the first people she thought of when she got the news. She did not get promoted because of me. That was all her. I just helped, here and there, when it counted. But being even a small part of someone growth is a feeling that does not have a competitor.
These are the parts of the job I would now call the real human skills, the ones that do not show up in any onboarding doc.
Leading a support team is its own animal
Some of this is specific to support, and if that is your world, it is worth naming.
In a lot of SaaS companies, support is the front door. It is where people start, often young, often early in their careers, often planning to move on to development, product, somewhere else. Some fall in love with support and stay (I did). But many are passing through. That is a challenge, sure. It is also one of the most rewarding parts of the job, because you get to help people grow, and sometimes launch a career.
Support also tends to get seen as a cost center. It does not generate revenue. It resolves problems and handles small, customer-driven demands. Which means you are constantly proving your value just to earn budget and investment. You learn to make your case, over and over.
There is the built-in tension between support, the customer advocate, and product or development, who are weighing other priorities. It is not a war, and I would never frame it as one. But it is something you have to actively manage with process and empathy on both sides.
And there is the grind. Support people answer the same tickets, the same problems, day after day, heavier over chat, heavier still over phone. Compare it to a creative or marketing team jumping between fresh projects. Support is a different kind of tired. So you build in variety. A project. A rotation. Something that breaks the loop. Because here is what I genuinely believe. There is no great customer experience without a great employee experience. A tired, frustrated, demotivated agent transmits exactly that to every customer they touch. It is the flip side of something I wrote about before: real empathy in customer service starts with how the people giving it are treated. Take care of the people, and the metrics follow, not the other way around.
How I knew I was getting it
There was never a single moment where it clicked. It came in glimpses.
I worked with some genuinely excellent people who were difficult. Sharp, high-performing, hard to manage. When I figured out how to build a real relationship with someone like that, and watched it turn into trust and great work, that told me I was growing. Not a course. Not a title. The harder the person, the louder the signal.
The clearest sign, though, was watching people I helped develop step up. I had a hand in growing two managers at a previous company. One desperately wanted it but, like me once, did not have the obvious “manager profile.” She was an executor: direct, hands-on, not always smooth with people. But the drive was there, so I leaned in, and she became a coordinator. The other already was a leader, naturally, without the title. He just did not see it in himself. He was eyeing a move to product. It took a few one-on-ones for him to realize he had the talent, that he actually liked it, and that it fit.
I will let you sit with the symmetry there. I once got told I was not management material. Years later I was the one telling someone with the exact same “wrong” profile that the profile was never the point.
That is the advice for first-time managers I wish someone had handed me on day one. Nobody starts cut out for this. You are not supposed to. You build it, in the delegating, in the hard conversations you stop softening, in the people you help become more than they thought they were. The profile is not a prerequisite. It is a byproduct.