Fist-Time Manager Purgatory
You're not an IC anymore, but you're not leading yet...
We’ve promoted several people on my team to first-time manager roles over the last few months. They’re leading teams of one or two and getting their “management” feet wet to prepare them for roles where they’re managing more complex projects. I’m excited about them having the opportunity, and as always they’re stepping up. It’s so satisfying to see someone you’ve led as an IC make the jump to manager.
It’s like giving your strongest muscles a bigger lever. I love it. I’m also digressing.
The first few months as a new manager are rough. You’re not an analyst anymore, but you don’t feel like a manager yet either. You’re doing both, and not doing either especially well.
I remember being there. I kept the IC work I’d always done, added the manager work on top, and convinced myself I was being heroic. I didn’t delegate because I wanted to be “nice” and not overwork anyone, while I spent hours after the end of the day doing the work I should have delegated.
This pattern shows up in almost every new manager I’ve worked with. It’s not a personal failing. It’s a predictable consequence of how analytics teams get built and how analytics promotions happen. It’s also totally normal, but the faster a new manager can move beyond it, the sooner they can start growing as a manager instead of a super-IC.
Why you get stuck
The org keeps routing work to you because you’re the person who got it done before. Your stakeholders have built up years of trust in you specifically, not in your team. When something urgent shows up, the easiest thing is for you to handle it. You’re faster, you know the context, and the request lands in your inbox anyway.
That’s the structural side. The identity side is harder.
Your reputation, your confidence, your sense of being good at your job, all of it got built doing the work. Not managing the work. Shipping the dashboard, finding the insight, being the person the executive emails when they need something. Letting go of that doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like giving up the thing that made you valuable.
IC work is also easier to measure than management work. You sent the analysis or you didn’t. You hit the deadline or you didn’t. Management work is fuzzier. You can’t tell at the end of a week whether your coaching landed, or whether the team’s work is better because you were involved. You can’t measure it, so you drift back to the work you can.
The most common pattern
Here’s the version I see most often. The new manager has priority work landing on her plate. She’s always been the person who reliably delivers, and that reliability is what got her promoted. When the urgent thing shows up, she does what she’s always done. She puts her head down, grinds it out and ships it.
Meanwhile, her team has capacity. They want real work. They’re watching her grind through her ticket queue wondering why she isn’t handing them more.
She thinks she’s protecting them. She’s keeping the hard stuff on her plate so they don’t get crushed. She’s protecting the stakeholders too, by making sure the work gets done right. It feels generous. It feels like good leadership.
That’s the story she tells herself. The real picture is a manager doing IC work while her team waits for permission to do their actual jobs.
I’m not saying any of this from a height. I’ve done it. I still catch myself doing it. The instinct to protect the team by absorbing the hard work is hard to spot because it feels generous when you’re doing it.
What it costs
The visible cost is that you’re working too many hours. That one’s obvious, and people will tell you about it.
The hidden costs are worse. You don’t have time for the work nobody else can do for you: setting direction, talking to senior stakeholders, coaching your team through analyses so they get better. That work isn’t urgent on any given Tuesday, so it gets crowded out by what is.
You also train your stakeholders to keep coming to you directly. Every time you take a request yourself instead of routing it through your team, you reinforce that you’re the person who does the work. Two years in, you’ve got a team your stakeholders don’t trust with anything important, and that’s on you.
Your team learns to wait. They don’t build judgment because they’re not making the calls. They become executors of whatever you hand them, not problem-solvers. When you eventually try to hand off something important, they haven’t done it before, which makes you take it back, which confirms your suspicion they couldn’t have done it anyway. And the pattern repeats.
I have a colleague who is great at this. He refuses to answer questions or email folks back when he’s not the right person. It sounds mean, but it reinforces the correct routing, keeps ownership of the relationship with his team and means they know the answer next time.
Rebalancing without the guilt
The shift isn’t from IC to manager in some clean swap. You’ll still do IC work. You should still do IC work, partly to stay credible and partly because some things are better in your hands. The shift is in the ratio.
A reasonable target early on is something like 70% manager work, 30% IC work, adjusted for the size of your team. The exact split matters less than the direction. If your calendar looks the same as it did before the promotion, something’s off.
Delegation isn’t dumping work you don’t want to do. It’s giving your team the problems they were hired to solve. They didn’t sign up to be your assistants. They signed up to do analysis and build things and have impact, same as you did.
A few things that help
Do a weekly inventory of what’s on your plate. Mark each item as IC work or leadership work. Look at the ratio. If IC is winning by a lot, pick two items and move them to someone on your team this week.
Build templates and shared standards so handing off doesn’t mean every analysis comes back looking wildly different. This is what lets you stop rewriting other people’s decks. If “good” is defined, more people can produce it.
When someone on your team ships something, resist the urge to fix the output. Review how they framed the problem and how they told the story instead. Give them one piece of feedback they can use next time, and let them ship the imperfect version. The work gets better through iteration with feedback, not through you rewriting it yourself.
A little assignment
Pick one project this month that genuinely matters and hand it to someone on your team end to end. Not a piece of it. The whole thing.
You’re the coach. You’re in the meetings as backup, not to take over when it gets uncomfortable. You review their framing, ask the questions that help them see what they’re missing, and let them present it themselves.
It will feel terrible. You’ll want to step in. You’ll be sure they’re going to miss something you would have caught. Sometimes they will. Most of the time they won’t, and you’ll learn the team is more capable than you’ve been treating them.
Feeling stuck between worlds isn’t evidence you’re bad at this. It’s evidence you’re mid-transition, which is where you’re supposed to be. The way out is on the manager side, not back where you came from.
If you’re going through this transition yourself, or coaching someone through it, I wrote a longer guide called Your First 90 Days As A Data Leader. It goes deeper on rebalancing your work, delegating without the guilt, and the first few systems you want to put in place.