Our company just turned most of the team leads into managers to unflatten the organization. Most of the team leads really shouldn't be managers, nor do many of them have any desire to.

Normally a company that wants to do this will create a few manager positions, and let everyone in the company apply for them first, before opening it up externally.

The way they've rolled this out seems like it can only be disastrous.

buy them the Book "The Making of a Manager" from Facebooks lead designer Julie Zhou, for new managers. It's really good.

https://goodreads.com/book/show/...

In a world where devs seek out flat hierarchies and cheer that management bullshit gets reduced... Some companies "unflatten".
Two steps forward, one step back.

What is the difference between team leads and managers? In my company both are the same for the first hierarchy step (middle management).

@2erXre5 in my experience, a team lead is somebody who's "responsible" for the team. He/she makes sure to be up to date on what the team is doing and what the team should be doing. He/she reports to a manager, who in turn has about a dozen team leads under him/her. The manager then reports to another manager, usually CTO or CEO.

In theory it should work like a bit like an army: general gives conceptual strategic ideas, the managers make tactical decisions and the team leads make small, operational decisions that the teams can actually carry out.

In practice, the manager usually tries to micromanage everything which ends in disaster for all parties involved. They bypass the team leads and give bad orders to the devs, who can't understand the orders because they don't make sense. The manager doesn't understand the operational side, but he forces it anyway.

You cannot simply manage more than +/- 15 people efficiently, and you should therefore not try it.

@Lucky-Loek I understand what you mean. But imho Team leaders are nothing else than managers of a team. So there is no difference in my opinion. The only difference might be: Upper management might not know in detail how the operational work looks like. But you will manage as a team leader as well, only in a more fine granular way.

@2erXre5 yeah, for sure! The team leads I've experienced were usually developers in their teams as well. Only difference was that they had 1-2 hours a day to check in on the team. Are we still doing the right thing?
But for sure, that's also managing people.