Nearly all of us in IT have reached a stage at some point in time in our career, where we are at a crossroad and confronted with the dilemma:
* Should I continue my career as an Individual Contributor? Or
* Should I make a move into Management?

Individual Contributor could mean a variety of possible career options – Technical career path, Program management path, etc. As an Individual Contributor, you are essentially “doing things” yourself.

Moving into Management means you are responsible for managing people. Here, you are essentially “Getting things done” through the people you manage.

This is perhaps one of the Crossroads scenarios in your career where you could use some help. Leveraging a lot of learning from The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders, I have created a simple self-assessment framework that should give you the answers necessary to make a decision. I have helped many of my mentees leverage this framework to arrive at the right decision (“Right” decision as evidenced from their self-evaluation done years since the decision was made), so I’m confident it will work for anyone.

Management and IC Assessment Framework

Using this framework/tool is self-explanatory. Please note that the score itself is not as important as the time you spend on reflection and an honest self-assessment. As they say, the journey here is more important than the destination. And the journey of self-assessment itself will give you the answers. I’ve rarely seen anyone come and discuss the actual scores with me – in nearly all my mentoring sessions around this Crossroads scenario, my mentee has come to me with enlightenment on what they want to do!

Please leverage this framework and let me know how it helped you.