The middle-manager crisis: When your greatest strength becomes your biggest obstacle

A love and hate story that many tech leaders face but very few acknowledge... and survive to share.

Summer of 2018. Great weather in Portugal. I’d recently relocated from Brazil, my homeland. I was getting traction on my international career. Living my dream.

But something was off in my mind.

It was my third year since I transitioned from the tech lead to the Engineering Manager role. Handling the ugly and exciting side of managing people, dealing with intrinsic politics, and getting closer to the business strategy.

It was exciting… but frustrating at the same time.

I was not coding anymore. Every tiny effort to work on a task positioned me as a bottleneck for my teams. I was delaying instead of speeding them up. I became an obstacle instead of an enabler.

And suddenly, the mythical idea of engaging passionately with tech while leading a team blurred, painting a new picture… a new reality.

I didn’t feel useful or fulfilled. The lines of code were tougher to follow. System designs became a theoretical subject on a daily basis. Every hands-on task was 10 times harder than usual.

I was in crisis… the middle-manager crisis.

At first, I thought this was something from my mind: “I’m just in a bad moment,” or the idea that I was trying to escape something uncomfortable… not entirely a lie, though.

But when I started leading other leaders, I could better understand the melody behind this music. I could see behind my blind spots and my ego. And what was a question mark in my head for quite a long time, now, I could give it a name.

Let’s discuss a few realizations I had along the way:

From executor to enabler

Your team does not need you to close their tasks. They need you to enable them to close their cards.

That’s where I see most aspiring leaders struggling the most. This represents a mindset shift. And shifting to a new mindset, my friend, it’s challenging.

We spent years of our professional journey improving our craft. Courses, certifications, time, effort, trials, and errors. You conquered that ground… and you’re proud of it.

If you chat in person with me about my journey or any tech challenge, chances are I'll demonstrate way more passion discussing the technical intricacies rather than people or politics topics. Not because I don’t like people management or politics, or processes. I love it, don’t get me wrong.

But it’s not the same.

I have worked with multiple technologies over my years as an IC: Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Kotlin, Node.js… a bit of everything. Most of them, I got a formal certification. Not that this means a lot in today’s market. But it’s an achievement that somehow acts as a testament to your commitment and domain in that tech.

And more than just updating your LinkedIn, you see tangible improvements in how you work daily. You become more effective. Your design decisions might be more accurate in extracting the best of the programming language. You level up your hands-on efficiency.

But all of a sudden, someone tells you that your main responsibility is not to solve tickets and implement features anymore.

At first, you use your sailor mouth to profane nice words in the air, and you even think: “Bullshit!”. Then, your calendar starts sending you signals with meetings you were not used to joining. Multiple stakeholders ping your Slack channels with requests for new implementations and reports for existing projects. Customers’ expectations clutter your communication channel, and distinguishing priorities is a challenge apart.

Your focus is to reduce the noise. You have a mission to digest and a plan to craft on how you will enable results that don’t depend only on you.

• What problems are we trying to solve?

• What are customers saying about this?

• How will we measure success when delivering this initiative?

• How can I orchestrate my team’s job with Team B's roadmap and priority?

I could expand all day, feeding this list.

Yet, if you choose to spend your time with low-level tactics, your team will suffer. Your lead time will increase. You will delay projects. And you risk building the wrong things.

You must accept that coding is not your primary responsibility anymore… and choose to live in peace with that.

Success is measured differently

Backlog → To-do → In progress → In review → Testing → Done.

For years, I bet this was your workflow. Very tangible milestones. One concrete start. One concrete end.

The start means you took time to understand the problem your customers are facing and how your product aims to solve it. You collaborated with your product and design team, and you are close to speaking the same language. The end in this case represents a chunk of deliverables that will impact business and help solve that specific problem… in theory, at least (a topic for another post, tho).

With the advent of Agile and other practices, we started connecting metrics such as velocity, review cycle, lead time, etc, to our performance. I remember feeling damn good looking to a dashboard with my numbers, and waiting with a certain anxiety for our team retrospective to publicly feel proud… ego alert!

The thing is, we are educated to have a tangible impact. We can plan for it, we can execute to get it, and we will know exactly when we get it.

That’s not the case when you become a manager.

Let me quote a common phrase we hear all the time: “What brought you here won’t guarantee you’ll succeed in the new role.” Your job is to make others succeed. You must open the way and set them to shine. You ensure to empower and to coach. You clarify the mission and goal… again, so they can shine!

Your success won’t be linear like your past development workflow. Your success is around their success. Full of ups and downs, love and hate.

And what you do with the downs and the hate, here is where you can find your success.

As soon as you realize this, it will be easier to thrive in your transition to the EM role.

People first, tech second

You read it right… people will come first than tech.

It means that now you have a different novel to direct… people management.

Human beings are interesting as hell. Different personalities. Different working preferences. Ambitions. Frustrations. Egos. Introverts. Extroverts. Pragmatics. Rushed. Senior in some hard skills, and junior in soft ones.

You will lead all flavours… believe me.

But your mission is to ensure your team works as a unit. A unit requires alignment even in adversities. Guess what? Your job is to understand how you extract a pseudo-perfection from an imperfect team.

Yes, imperfect. What is good to me might be bad for you, and so on.

And learning how to extract the best of each team member is a full-time duty. Moreover, they are the specialists. They were hired because they demonstrated the skills you need.

If I didn’t convince you yet, let’s think about building a team six from scratch. You got the cash, the headcount, the mission… but how to set up a team for success?

• Hiring six seniors?

• Picking the best in the trendy technologies?

• Find the master of debugging and delivering?

Although there is no right or wrong answer, my experience screams to me that hiring this new team must be a balancing act, where people are the main focus.

You might want to bring senior folks who bring value from home and help you set the tone quickly. You might want to invest in that mid-level who truly loves to engage with the product and think about everything UX. Or even bringing in that fresh grad who is hungry for a challenge and fresh energy.

Now, try to hire a tech guru… a master in all languages. But when it comes to collaboration and relationships, they are a jerk.

Immediate value → long-term disaster.

As I said, it’s a balancing act… a people act.

And knowing how to interpret the signals people is your responsibility as an EM.

Recogn… what?

We have achieved a great milestone by delivering fetaure XPTO. Our customers are thrilled, and the feature adoptions is skyrocketing. A huge thanks to John, Katie, Maria, Kevin…

The list goes on… but you don’t see your name.

The first times are shitty, I confess. I remember when one of my teams delivered a mission-critical project that I invested many late-night hours with them designing and joining customer calls in a different timezone, while my wife was breastfeeding our newborn with the most penetrating and killing eyes I ever saw in my entire life.

My professional life was going up… the personal one, down.

And when we finally crossed the finish line… just a void. No appreciation. No recognition. No one was telling me I did a good job. Not seeing my name in that fancy Slack message broke me somehow.

This taught me two unique things:

1. As an EM, your work is not easily visible to others. That’s because I was not an executor. There were no PRs with my name. No tickets assigned to me. And no Jira metrics were computed for my user. I was orchestrating, clarifying, and empowering. Paving the way from the backstage.

2. Fine-tune your perception to what matters to your new role as EM. Seeing my team get recognized in a big project was a testament to my influence and hard work. I set them up for success. I was the shit-funnel. I had tough conversations. I removed the noise, so they could do the best they could do.

But I’m not saying that you must always be good, seeing others getting the credit publicly. Sure, it’s amazing when we’re recognized for our hard work. However, don’t let this feed your ego. Don’t let this define your trajectory. Don’t let it make you lose focus.

Final thoughts

The middle-management crisis will follow us even when you're not in the middle management anymore.

The desire to transition back to an individual contributor role will always be with you. Sometimes, dormant. Sometimes, louder.

But when you face it (because you will), remember this: the crisis is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of growth. It's your brain trying to reconcile the person you were with the person you're becoming.

That restless feeling is your old identity fighting for survival. And the confusion about your impact is because you're learning to measure success in a completely different language.

I won't lie to you and say it gets easier. It doesn't. But it gets clearer.

You'll have days when you miss the simplicity of closing tickets. You'll have moments when you envy your team's ability to dive deep into code while you're stuck in your fourth meeting of the day. You'll question whether you made the right choice.

And that's okay.

Because on the other side of that crisis, you'll find something beautiful: the realization that your impact has multiplied. That the problems you solve now are bigger than any single feature. That the people you develop will carry your influence far beyond any code you could have written.

So, embrace the crisis. Sit with the discomfort. And remember: every great leader has walked this path.

And trust me, my friend… that's a high worth chasing.

– Rapha