How to Convince Your Boss You Should Be a Manager
You don’t need management experience to have leadership potential
Jessica Powell, the former Google vice president who wrote The Big Disruption and told you how to quit your job, is here to answer your common but tricky work questions. Check back every other week for more management advice with a tech inflection.
I’m an individual contributor at a growing company. Some of my peers have recently been promoted into management roles, and I’d like to be considered for a management position, too. How do I make the case for myself if I’ve never managed anyone before?
In an ideal world, you would never have to tout your managerial potential to your bosses. It would be obvious that with your brilliant individual performance, collaborative working style, and leaderlike behavior, you were a natural pick to become a manager.
That happens for some people. But quite often, who does and doesn’t get picked to be a manager is driven by a number of things — from the reasonable (for example, a specific skill set or geographic location is needed for a specific managerial role) to the unfair (for example, favoritism, whose work is most visible to the boss’s boss, or who fits the company’s typical manager profile in terms of age, race, gender, etc.).
