This so many times. This has been my journey to becoming a competent manager in the past year. What’s helped is framing it as: if I was someone’s manager after a year have they grown more or less than if I wasn’t there. We grow through being challenged and trying on new responsibilities. Delegating running meetings, scoping larger amounts of work, giving presentations— whatever. If you do all these things yourself you’re both making more work for yourself and keeping growth opportunities from your reports. The positive feedback loop is your team gets more done AND when you see someone go from struggling to crushing it at something you used to do it’s incredibly rewarding.

Another lesson hard learned was realizing it’s not my job to do everything like an IC. And especially not my job to personally fix all people problems. I’m merely just here to guide and coax along the right path. And give lots of specific feedback on what’s good and what’s not so good.

A hope maybe this helps the grandparent poster. Your post resonates heavily with where I was at a year or two ago. Being a manager ain’t easy. I’d argue much more so if you were a really strong IC.