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Yes, and there's a second major clause when you can longer unblock your direct reports by helping them directly. I've seen enough team leads carry their teams by basically working 60-hour weeks until the ICs learned by watching the boss do things the right way.
When your team is so big you have to manage other managers and not ICs, it's very easy to become adrift, especially if you relied on your own direct competence to manage by example. It's very easy to be carried away by the unending stream of meetings, thinking this is what your job is now about: communicating deadlines and reporting progress. You're constantly busy, this means you're making progress, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, and it's a pitfall I've experienced directly, it's not. Your job is to manage your team.
You have explicit KPIs to meet or deliberately ignore, you have to find out the real benefit you can bring to some C-level, your team wants to do stuff that looks great on a CV. And it's your job to harmonize these goals.
If your team is blocked, you have to unblock them, but now you can't afford a deep dive yourself. You need people that can dive for you, you have to get them to dive before you miss the deadline and your own role is now negotiating primarily non-technical unblocking solutions with other managers.
I think there are three tiers:
These are all very different skill sets.
An IC is evaluated on whether they are good at the job. A manager is evaluated on whether the ICs they manage collectively deliver the job relative to the expectations negotiated with senior managers. Senior managers deal with politics, optics, and strategy.
All of these roles are important and it says a lot about you if you denigrate any one of them. I think of this as analogous to discussions of class: if you think the working class is great, but the upper-middle class sucks, or the reverse, you don’t get it. (See Fussel)
I think the transition between these role tiers is hard and harder for some than others. If you are a technical person who thrives on solving problems, you are probably a Parker IC. You may stay a Parker as a manager if your team is strong and you stay involved technically. You probably suck at performance reviews and morale stuff, but this might be fine. But when you rise to Senior management it’s a nightmare. You hate politics, but you have to play politics anyway and you are bad at it. You miss the forest for the trees, etc. Too many people like this too high up and the culture becomes combative and "my way or the highway" egotism.
Another person might be less technical and more of an operator: less interested in the problems than the big picture. And the biggest picture is their own career which they pursue ruthlessly. They may be okay as an IC, but they love the power and responsibility of management and do well as managers and senior managers. They probably care more about their reports as people rather than as problem-solving cogs, but technical ICs tend to not like these people anyway because they are grasping and don’t know how to actually make the thing. Ultimately people like this are good at navigating organizations and too many of these people and you get endless politics and empire building which bloats the company and the firm fails to to actually do the thing.
I think one of Elons great skills is his “small highly technical teams” that limit the Parker ICs from having to navigate a web set for them by the operators above. This is only possible because Elon is technical enough himself to obviate the need for management layers. A rare thing.
I feel like the better analogy here is not social class but rather the military: ICs correspond to enlisted men, managers-of-ICs to NCOs, and managers-of-managers to commissioned officers. Competence across all three strata is vital to the ability of the armed forces to fight and win wars.
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