Kasra Vaziri
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The First-Time Manager I Wish I’d Had When I Started

A reflective essay on what good management actually looks like — the manager who protects instead of blocks, gives context instead of orders, and grows people instead of using them.

Kasra Vaziri8 min read

The first manager I ever had taught me everything about management by being a cautionary tale. I don't say that to be cruel. He was a decent person having a hard year. But when I think about who I want to be for the people I lead now — as a first-time manager myself, years ago, fumbling through it — I keep picturing a kind of manager I never actually had. Someone I had to assemble from books, from the few good bosses I watched from across the room, and from my own scar tissue.

This is a letter to that imagined person. The manager I wish I'd had when I started, and the one I'm still trying to become.

What a first-time manager actually inherits

Nobody tells you that the day you become a manager, the job you were good at quietly disappears. You were promoted for shipping things. Now your output is other people's output, and the skills that got you here — speed, taste, finishing — can actively work against you. You hover. You take the interesting problem back. You confuse being busy with being useful.

Julie Zhuo names this better than anyone. In The Making of a Manager, she frames the role around three things: purpose, people, and process — and insists that great managers are made, not born. I find that line genuinely consoling. It means the version of me who was anxious and clumsy in my first six months wasn't disqualified. I was just at the start of a long apprenticeship that nobody had told me I'd enrolled in.

The manager I wish I'd had would have said that out loud on day one. You don't know how to do this yet. That's fine. Here's what we're going to practice.

The manager who protects vs. the one who blocks

Here is the first fork in the road, and it took me too long to see it.

A protective manager stands between their team and the chaos above — the shifting priorities, the executive whims, the Friday-afternoon fire drills. They absorb the noise so their people can think. A blocking manager does something that looks superficially similar and is its opposite: they stand between their team and information, between their team and opportunity, between their team and anyone who might notice good work. One is a windshield. The other is a wall.

I had a wall once. Every decision routed through him, every conversation with leadership happened without us in the room, and we found out about reorgs the way you find out about weather. He'd have called it protecting us from politics. It was protecting his own position.

Camille Fournier draws this distinction with unusual honesty in The Manager's Path. She structures whole sections as "Good Manager, Bad Manager," and the through-line is trust versus fear: the manager who shares information openly, good or bad, versus the one who hoards it, micromanages, and leads from anxiety. Reading it the first time felt like being seen. Reading it as a new manager felt like a warning label for the person I might accidentally become.

The protective manager I wish I'd had would have done the unglamorous work: taken the meeting so I didn't have to, then told me everything that happened in it.

The manager who gives context vs. the one who gives orders

The laziest thing a manager can do is hand someone a task with no why attached. It feels efficient. Do this by Thursday. It is, in fact, the most expensive shortcut there is, because the moment reality shifts — and it always shifts — the person executing has no idea what to preserve and what to drop.

Context is what lets people make good decisions when you're not in the room. And you are almost never in the room.

This is also, quietly, the most data-backed claim in this whole essay. When Google studied its own managers in Project Oxygen, the behaviors that separated the great from the average weren't what engineers expected. Technical brilliance mattered least. At the very top sat "is a good coach," followed closely by "empowers the team and does not micromanage." The best managers in one of the most technical companies on earth won by giving people room and judgment, not answers.

I think about that ranking a lot. The instinct of a first-time manager — especially one promoted for being the best individual contributor — is to be the smartest person in every conversation. The research says the opposite is the actual skill. Give the problem and the context. Then get out of the way.

The manager I wish I'd had wouldn't have told me what to build. He'd have told me what we were trying to win, and why it mattered, and trusted me to figure out the how — and to come back when I was stuck.

The manager who grows people vs. the one who uses them

This is the one that still gets me.

There's a kind of manager who is excellent in the short term and corrosive over years. They put you on exactly the work that serves their goals, extract your best output, and never once ask where you are trying to go. You are a resource being allocated. It can take a while to notice, because the work is often good and the praise is often real. But you look up after two years and realize you're more useful to them and no closer to who you wanted to become.

The alternative is a manager who treats your growth as part of their job, not a favor. Marcus Buckingham made the cleanest case for this twenty years ago in What Great Managers Do, and it has aged perfectly. His argument: great managers spend their energy "discovering, developing, and celebrating what's different about each person." They don't smooth people into interchangeable units. They learn the specific, idiosyncratic shape of each person and build a role around it.

That's a harder, slower way to manage. It means you actually have to know people. But it's the only version that compounds — for them and, not incidentally, for you.

What this turns into, concretely

I distrust management writing that floats. So here is the version a first-time manager can start doing on Monday, drawn from everything above:

  • Run toward the meeting, not the keyboard. When you feel the pull to take the interesting task back, that's the signal you're managing wrong. Absorb the chaos; hand out the clarity.

  • Default to context, not instruction. Before you assign anything, say the why — what we're trying to win and what would make this a failure even if it ships on time.

  • Share what you know, fast. Reorg news, budget reality, the hard feedback from above. Hoarding information feels like protection and functions like control.

  • Ask the growth question on purpose. Once a month, in a 1:1, ask "where are you trying to go, and is this work taking you there?" Then actually act on the answer.

  • Coach more than you correct. When someone's stuck, resist the urge to solve it for them. Ask the question that helps them solve it themselves. Project Oxygen put that behavior at number one for a reason.

None of this is exotic. That's the point. The manager I wish I'd had wasn't a genius. He was just someone who chose, repeatedly, the slightly harder behavior — the windshield over the wall, the context over the order, the person over the resource.

I'm not always that manager. Some weeks I catch myself hovering, or shipping someone else's decision because mine would've been faster. But I know the shape of who I'm trying to be now, which is more than I had at the start. If you're a first-time manager reading this with that specific flavor of dread in your chest: you're not behind. You've just been handed an apprenticeship nobody warned you about. Become the manager you wish you'd had. It's the only training that was ever going to work anyway.

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