We were adding more leadership at Shutterstock, and I did not want every new manager inventing the job alone.
An engineering leader had put together a workshop series built around communication, leadership, negotiation, cooperation, team creativity, working across cultures, and the emotional side of management. The proposal combined self-paced study with discussions about how to apply the material inside the company.
I thought it was excellent and planned to share it with my team.
The specific courses mattered less to me than the operating principle. Technical organizations often promote people because they are excellent engineers, reliable operators, or the person everyone already asks for help. Then we hand them direct reports and assume judgment about systems will automatically become judgment about people.
It does not.
Managing asks for a different set of repetitions. Give clear feedback. Negotiate priorities. Handle conflict before it becomes theater. Create enough safety for somebody to say the plan is broken. Know when to be direct and when to ask another question. Help a strong individual become useful to a whole team.
Those skills can be taught, practiced, and discussed. A shared framework also creates continuity across groups. That does not mean every manager needs the same personality or makes every decision the same way. It means people should not experience a completely different company depending on which technical team they join.
The timing was important. We were not trying to bolt management training onto a settled organization. We were growing while the infrastructure, product, offices, and company all changed around us. New leaders were already taking on more responsibility. The training needed to arrive while their habits were still forming.
The first series was planned for April through June, with the hope that participants might later teach others. I liked that idea. A program becomes part of the culture when the people using it can carry it forward, not when it remains a service delivered by one organizer.
I had spent years arguing that operations should be treated as engineering. The same logic applied here: management was work, and work gets better when we train for it.