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This isn’t the most fruitful time in the tech industry to aspire to be a technical manager, with companies looking to increase the number of direct reports per manager and decrease the layers of management in their company. See for example:

Meta Platforms Inc. is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as it tries to become more efficient[…] The process is known internally as a “flattening”

Meta Asks Many Managers to Get Back to Making Things or Leave, Bloomberg, February 2023

However, the managers with newly larger teams, and even their managers, often don’t agree with upper management that their load is reasonable. And there are still pockets of growth within flat or shrinking companies and the management of those pockets still may not be allowed to add managers to accommodate it.

With lower formal demand for managers but continued informal demand for them comes increased opportunities to exploit would-be managers, or former managers, by making them “shadow managers”. Here’s how it looks:

• the team has a line manager, known to the HR system as the manager of the team;
• the team also has shadow managers: team members who are told they are “basically managers” or who step in to fill gaps they see; they might be aspiring to management, or they might be ex-managers who were moved out of formal management roles in a flattening process; and then were asked to continue most of their previous management tasks anyway;
• the shadow managers take on a significant amount of management overhead in their work: they might be doing the bulk of coaching teammates, assessing their teammates’ performance, doing their teammates’ performance assessment paperwork, preparing their teammates’ promotion cases, giving their teammates feedback, and deciding if they have addressed it.

This can seem to everyone involved like a win-win. The line manager is overworked. The team needs help. And the shadow manager wants to be a manager, and this gives them a chance to try before they buy, and to get some skills while they do it.

But when shadow management goes on indefinitely, here’s how it works out badly for the shadow manager’s career:

• Even with locally supportive management, this isn’t the shadow manager’s core job and so can easily end up being many hours on top of their daily workload rather than offsetting any of it.
• Due to changes above or around them — a change in the line manager, or the hierarchy above finding out about and shutting down an undocumented shadow arrangement, or the team shrinking — the shadow management work isn’t needed any more. Due to the switch of focus, the shadow manager’s individual contributor skills are rusty and their recent contributions are low, and so their performance is suddenly at risk.
• The shadow manager applies for a management job outside the company or even in another team, citing their shadow management experience. Since the never had formal direct reports, they are assessed as having zero experience in management and are incredibly unlikely to get the job.
• If they do enter formal management, their management years of experience are counted only from when they began formally managing, their time spent shadow managing isn’t considered when they want to progress to senior management positions.

There’s certainly good reasons to give people interested in management exposure to it before they lock in a career change, but it shouldn’t be viewed as a favour to the potential manager to have them do the job indefinitely without documented responsibility. Quite the reverse.

The more ethical ways to develop future managers are:

Create junior managers rather than shadow managers. Give an inexperienced manager a small number of official direct reports and close supervision and coaching as a stepping stone to managing a full team. This starts the clock on their years of experience as a manager, and if your organisation gates manager tooling and training on having direct reports, this will give them access to those as well.

Shadow management should be linked to a position and time-boxed. If asking someone to manage without the lines of reporting, it should be linked to a written dated plan to change to managing those staff, with success criteria and an exit plan from the shadow management responsibilities if it’s not working out or if no position becomes available. Six months is reasonable; this gives sufficient exposure to the team’s planning and career cycles without knocking years of experience off their management career.

Time spent on leadership tasks should be planned for and rewarded. If an aspiring manager is mentoring, hosting interns, or assisting in reviewing or assessing their colleagues’ work, this should be recognised in their individual performance, and in their role description if it’s a regular task. Their individual contributor expectations should be reduced to allow for this workload. Their work should be documented in a way that at least assists internal job applications, even if it’s not likely to be recognised as management experience on the job market should they want to search for management jobs.

If required to flatten your organisation, actually do so. Don’t flatten it on paper but sneakily leave all your excess managers in place as shadow managers. Instead, transfer their manager-specific leadership tasks to a line manager, and invest in developing their individual contributor career or finding them transfer opportunities as a line manager to a team that needs them.