Imposter syndrome
It’s normal and expected. If you don’t have it you might just be too cocky.
Get support from mentors. If you are an associate manager you should have a dedicated mentor but also other options exist, either through formal mentoring “Mentoring in DH” or just reaching out to people that inspire you.
Define your management style & be predictable & define your vision
It will take a bit of time to properly define it but it is crucial. I got mine wrong in the beginning and I thought I was one kind while I turned out to be the other.
From my experience I had very “laissez-faire” & supportive managers. All my career, I had “Carte Blanche” on whatever I was doing but because I was right a lot and a good track record of it.
Autocratic: authoritative, persuasive, and paternalistic
One good approach I found is to create a decision tree which will help define your leadership style. You can start with you and how you would behave in certain situations. Each time you face a situation you are not sure how to feel about, clarify that with your own values and put that in your decision tree. Don’t forget that what is expected of you is to have a backbone and be consistent and predictable in your decisions, never ever should your staff be uncertain on how you would react to a situation.
To help you define your decision tree you can start by asking yourself these questions:
- What if people are late to meetings? What is the acceptable threshold? Is there an amount of time it can happen or a rate? Or you don’t care?
- What if there is an incident?
- How do you decide what should be built next?
- What if someone needs to leave for an urgency?
- What if someone wants to go to Bali in a week for a 2 week long holiday and did not give notice?
- How do we deploy things?
And you’ll be very happy when these situations happen because you would have thought of it. Nonetheless, it has to be a living document because you will encounter situations that you have never expected to experience in the first place. You deal with people, people are complex and unexpected and you want to be the exact opposite: strong backbone and predictable..