Not every manager chose to be one. Sometimes the team grows around you and suddenly you’re the most senior person. Sometimes your manager leaves and someone needs to fill the gap. Sometimes the company is too small to hire a dedicated manager, and you’re the engineer who seems most capable of doing it alongside your technical work.

However it happens, you find yourself managing people without ever having made a deliberate decision to pursue management. And the question you’re left with is: now what?

How It Happens

The accidental manager path is more common than the deliberate one, especially at start-ups and smaller companies. The typical pattern goes something like this: you’re a strong IC, you naturally start helping junior engineers, you end up coordinating work across the team, and one day someone says “you’re basically managing this team already, want to make it official?”

The flattery is real. Being asked to lead is a recognition of your skills and your standing in the team. But the question deserves more thought than it usually gets. “You’re good at helping people” and “you should be a manager” are not the same statement. Helping people is one part of management. The rest includes performance reviews, difficult conversations, organisational politics, hiring, firing, and spending most of your day in meetings rather than writing code.

Jesse Anderson makes an important point: don’t force promotions into management. Ask people what they actually want. The fact that someone is a natural mentor or coordinator doesn’t mean they want to, or should, become a people manager. Creating strong IC tracks that go as high as management tracks is one of the most important things an organisation can do, and it’s something I’ve advocated for everywhere I’ve worked.

Making the Best of It

If you’ve found yourself in a management role and you’ve decided to give it a genuine try, here’s what I’ve found helps:

Accept that you’re a beginner. Your technical skills don’t transfer directly to management. You’re learning a new craft, and you’ll be bad at it for a while. That’s normal. Give yourself the same grace you’d give a junior engineer learning a new technology.

Find a mentor or peer group. Jean Hsu’s advice for the engineer-to-manager transition is spot on: find peer support and consider working with a coach. Having someone who’s been through the same transition and can normalise your experience is invaluable. The feelings of imposter syndrome, the frustration of unproductive days, the guilt about not writing code, they’re all universal, and hearing that from someone else helps.

Learn the basics deliberately. Read Fournier’s The Manager’s Path. It’s structured to follow the career progression from IC to senior leader, and the early chapters on managing people are exactly what accidental managers need. Learn how to run a good one-on-one. Learn how to give feedback. Learn how to have a difficult conversation. These are skills, not talents, they can be developed with practice.

Set a timeline for evaluation. Give yourself six months to a year, then honestly assess whether you’re finding meaning in the work. Not whether you’re good at it yet, that takes longer, but whether the fundamental nature of the work appeals to you. Do you find satisfaction in helping someone grow? Do you enjoy thinking about team dynamics and organisational problems? Or do you spend most of your time wishing you were back in the code?

The Honest Assessment

There’s no shame in deciding that management isn’t for you. In fact, making that decision honestly is one of the most mature things you can do for yourself and your team. A reluctant manager is rarely a good manager, the team can sense when their leader would rather be somewhere else.

The signals to watch for:

Persistent avoidance. If you’re consistently avoiding the core management tasks, one-on-ones, feedback conversations, performance reviews, and filling your time with technical work instead, that’s a signal. Everyone avoids uncomfortable tasks sometimes, but if the pattern is consistent, it’s telling you something.

Energy drain. Management should be energising at least some of the time. If every management interaction leaves you depleted and every technical interaction leaves you energised, the mismatch is clear.

Resentment. If you resent the time management takes away from technical work, rather than seeing it as a different kind of valuable contribution, that resentment will eventually leak into your interactions with your team.

No growth. If after six months you’re not getting better at the management parts of the job, not because you’re not trying, but because you can’t bring yourself to engage with them, that’s worth paying attention to.

The Way Back

Going back to an IC role after trying management is not a failure. It’s self-awareness. The industry is slowly getting better at recognising this, but there’s still a stigma in some organisations that treats the move back to IC as a demotion. It isn’t. It’s a lateral move to a role where you’ll be more effective and more fulfilled.

If you decide to make the move back, be honest about why. “I tried management and discovered that I’m more impactful and more engaged as an IC” is a perfectly respectable thing to say. Most good leaders will respect the self-awareness it takes to make that call.

The experience of having managed, even briefly, isn’t wasted. You’ll understand your own managers better. You’ll be more empathetic to the challenges they face. You’ll communicate more effectively because you’ve seen the other side. And you’ll be a better senior IC because you understand the organisational context that your technical work sits within.

The Accidental Manager Who Stays

Some accidental managers discover, to their surprise, that they love it. The helping, the coaching, the problem-solving at the human level, it turns out to be deeply satisfying in ways they didn’t expect. If that’s you, lean in. The fact that you didn’t plan to be a manager doesn’t make you any less suited to it. Some of the best managers I’ve worked with fell into the role by accident and found their calling.

The key is that the choice to stay should be a choice, not inertia, not obligation, not the absence of an alternative. Choose management because you want to do it, not because you ended up doing it and can’t figure out how to stop.

Whether you stay or go, the important thing is that you decide deliberately. Accidental managers who drift along without making a conscious choice end up in a limbo that serves nobody, not them, not their team, and not the organisation. Make the call. Either way, you’ll be better for it.