Would you rather be a manager of individual contributors or a director who manages a group of senior managers and why? Looking for pros/ cons of each role.

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I am much happier managing managers and not directly managing ICs.

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Eh, it depends. I was thinking of this recently actually. If you lead a function that has commonality amongst all the roles under it (sales is a good example of this), leading the senior staff is better as they'll genetally be higher quality and it's steering the ship and setting tone (missing/vision/core strategy).

If you're over an area with a lot of variety in the roles of functional staff thst you lead, leading the senior staff is hard to make changes. It becomes more about finding the right key people to take accountability for those functional areas... the problem with this is its very easy to get dragged into minutiae, especially if you're in a high visibility part of the organization.

I think generally the former is better, but it's more cutthroat as it's live or die by the results and there's usually others doing the same function also at a senior level that you'll be compared to.

Most are limited in wherever they get to choose one or another by their career path specialties to whether they get to pick one or another until very late career. IMO growth through the second path makes more versatile leaders though too so uts a but of a coin flip really

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Actually. I realize I didn't really answer your question
I would pick leading the leaders, but know that you'll almost always have one or more of them that thought they should've got your job and be ready for that turnover (and general drama) whenl it comes

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I once took a job as a VP managing a bunch of directors. As I was introducing myself to them, one of them said to me, “I should have gotten your job.” My response, “but you didn’t.” He didn’t know what to say and we got along pretty well after that.

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