Unfortunately, things have changed a lot in the last 10 years. Foremost is the idea of what management's role is supposed to be.
This is nowhere more apparent than in a development group where you're likely to find that the lowest guy on the rung (as far as the organisation chart is concerned) knows more about solving the problems than you do. Under such circumstances, it's much more difficult to adopt the old-school "Me management-you follow orders" approach.
While you don't have to prove that you are the top dog or that you actually know more than your team members do, there are demands on your abilities. The foremost thing is on your ability to attract solid members, being able to coach them and bring out the best in them. All these depend more on leadership than management skills.
To be honest, I'm not even convinced that if you are starting out with a highly motivated and intellengent group of people - that managing them is what's necessary in the first place. In fact, this is probably the way to demotivate them.
However, a good coach knows how to keep everyone focused on what's important - instead of what's urgent. What I find is that if you really want to learn to be good at managing a team - that there is much to learn in the area of sports coaching and in team sports.
During the game, the coach is not the one on the floor. He is not even in control of the outcome or how the game gets played. This is one of the most difficult lessons to learn - letting go of control and letting your team players take charge of the game.
You will find that there will be considerable pressure from the top to force you into behaviour that proves to them that you are 'managing' when in fact you are getting in the way. One thing you will find is that your very best people just need to know from you where/what needs to be done - then they will demand that you get out of the way so that they can do what they do best.
As a manager, what they do demand is that you know enough about their job (and you should, since you were formerly a technical guy) to mobilise the right resources for them, while keeping higher levels of management away so that they can get their job done.
Needless to say - you will now measure your performance by how well they do, instead of how well you do as an individual. If you do these well - you will know that you are doing a good job when (1) people assume you don't do anything and (2) all the best people in the organisation want to work under you instead.
The best team leaders are also people who are always looking out for the best talent. This includes potential or undiscovered talent. I've had the joy and pleasure of turning coders who were slaving away unrecognised in some other development group and they've turned into team leaders themselves within the year. The way I found them was to first start building a small killer team (from scratch, the team had no prior experience) and the person was then attracted to our team (he started spending more time hanging around our work area than at his own desk!).
I'll end off by saying that the best manager (boss and also business partner) that I've had the pleasure of working with/for is someone who's a coach by inclination, who's taken lots of programming classes, but can't write a single line of code to save his life - but is someone that most developers I know gravitate to.
The key is that he respects the opinion of others, has a wonderful ability to build and assemble a team around him and has a true appreciation (going beyond most developers) of technology and has great conflict resolution skills. People who know him want to get on the team because the team knows what it's like to win and to continue enjoying winning.
Good people don't need to be managed, they need a clear vision and strong leadership.
What if you compute the cost of what it will take for them to actually hire the people, do the production, maintain the site, hosting it, doing system administration etc.
Then add the cost of having someone do the business development, sales.
Once you have that - add a margin percentage on top of that cost and you have a figure which you can use as a starting point for negotiations.
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This is nowhere more apparent than in a development group where you're likely to find that the lowest guy on the rung (as far as the organisation chart is concerned) knows more about solving the problems than you do. Under such circumstances, it's much more difficult to adopt the old-school "Me management-you follow orders" approach.
While you don't have to prove that you are the top dog or that you actually know more than your team members do, there are demands on your abilities. The foremost thing is on your ability to attract solid members, being able to coach them and bring out the best in them. All these depend more on leadership than management skills.
To be honest, I'm not even convinced that if you are starting out with a highly motivated and intellengent group of people - that managing them is what's necessary in the first place. In fact, this is probably the way to demotivate them.
However, a good coach knows how to keep everyone focused on what's important - instead of what's urgent. What I find is that if you really want to learn to be good at managing a team - that there is much to learn in the area of sports coaching and in team sports.
During the game, the coach is not the one on the floor. He is not even in control of the outcome or how the game gets played. This is one of the most difficult lessons to learn - letting go of control and letting your team players take charge of the game.
You will find that there will be considerable pressure from the top to force you into behaviour that proves to them that you are 'managing' when in fact you are getting in the way. One thing you will find is that your very best people just need to know from you where/what needs to be done - then they will demand that you get out of the way so that they can do what they do best.
As a manager, what they do demand is that you know enough about their job (and you should, since you were formerly a technical guy) to mobilise the right resources for them, while keeping higher levels of management away so that they can get their job done.
Needless to say - you will now measure your performance by how well they do, instead of how well you do as an individual. If you do these well - you will know that you are doing a good job when (1) people assume you don't do anything and (2) all the best people in the organisation want to work under you instead.
The best team leaders are also people who are always looking out for the best talent. This includes potential or undiscovered talent. I've had the joy and pleasure of turning coders who were slaving away unrecognised in some other development group and they've turned into team leaders themselves within the year. The way I found them was to first start building a small killer team (from scratch, the team had no prior experience) and the person was then attracted to our team (he started spending more time hanging around our work area than at his own desk!).
I'll end off by saying that the best manager (boss and also business partner) that I've had the pleasure of working with/for is someone who's a coach by inclination, who's taken lots of programming classes, but can't write a single line of code to save his life - but is someone that most developers I know gravitate to.
The key is that he respects the opinion of others, has a wonderful ability to build and assemble a team around him and has a true appreciation (going beyond most developers) of technology and has great conflict resolution skills. People who know him want to get on the team because the team knows what it's like to win and to continue enjoying winning.
Good people don't need to be managed, they need a clear vision and strong leadership.
What if you compute the cost of what it will take for them to actually hire the people, do the production, maintain the site, hosting it, doing system administration etc.
Then add the cost of having someone do the business development, sales.
Once you have that - add a margin percentage on top of that cost and you have a figure which you can use as a starting point for negotiations.