One of the biggest mindset adjustments I had to make when transitioning to a manager was to learn to not cut the burger for my team.

One time my wife and I were out to eat with a friend of ours, and he was having issues trying to eat the comically gigantic burger he had ordered. My wife offered to cut it in half for him to make it easier to eat. Keep in mind: we’re all grown people. He was perfectly capable of doing it himself, but my wife works a lot with kids, so it’s her normal instinct to just step in and fix problems like that regardless of whether it’s the best option in the situation.

I had an issue with this when I stepped into my first Pure Manager™ role. I was just as technical as my team and love solving technical problems with code, which was helpful when it came to estimating, unblocking team members, guiding technical decisions, and so on. But it also made me really prone to cutting the burger. Oh, you’re stuck on a problem? You know what, just let me slide in here and fix that. We need to get a feature out the door? I’ll just jump in and crank out some code really quick.

If you do this as a manager, you (without even meaning to) may be doing a number of bad things for your team. You may be depriving them of a growth and learning moment. You might be depriving them of your attention on something more “managerial” that would help the whole team rather than dealing with this one problem you’re trying to address. You could be making them feel like, since you’re having to “step in,” that they’re not doing a good enough job even though you’re really just trying to accelerate the work forward.

Early on in my managerial journey, I had to apologize to a lot of team members about this issue. I just wanted to get my grubby paws on all these cool problems and solve them! I love to code! But I needed a reality check. The first time it happened, I had a team member get very upset with me nearly to the point of tears because he felt like he was working as hard as he possibly could, but I felt like I still needed to step in to help. That made him feel like he wasn’t doing a good enough job when in reality, I saw that he was working incredibly hard and wanted to help him out. In doing so (at least uninvited), I communicated a pretty negative message with my actions.

Obviously, there are caveats. If your involvement or intervention is invited, of course you need to act. If the work is something you should be responsible for in the first place (i.e., something manager-y), obviously step in to do it. But don’t deprive your team of the opportunity to do their work and/or grow just because you can’t keep your tendencies in check.

Don’t cut the burger for your team.