Understand what management means. It means to extract value. You can do work, or you can manage it, which means getting credit for keeping the ball in the air,

Understand what management means. It means to extract value. You can do work, or you can manage it, which means getting credit for keeping the ball in the air, and attritioning out anyone who doesn't. This is anathema to people who actually solve problems (like me), but it's for a very specific reason. When you are in kindergarten, there are kids who build forts, and kids who play musical chairs. The skills for each are mutually exclusive, where one requires co-operation, creativity, and shared vision, and the other requires an understanding of the dynamic between power and limited resources. If you mess with the fort building kid, you're probably going to get called dumb and shoved, and if you mess with the musical chairs playing kid, they will find a way to make sure you get cooties or find an authority to tell on you to. Nothing much really changes. Engineers build forts, middle managers play musical chairs, and if you show them them they are being dumb, they will edge you out in some variation of a purity game, because on a deep level they don't need a fort, they just need a chair when the music slows down, and for someone else to get cooties first. An enterprise project is either a zero sum credit and status game or an attrition game. In most large orgs, it's the latter. You don't win attrition games, you survive them, which means understanding when the music is slowing down, and keeping track of who is most likly to flame out and rage quit or get cooties, because if you can't see who it is, it's you. Personally, I like solving problems and unblocking engineers so they can build amazing forts, but you can't do that if you don't have a seat when the music stops, so you learn to balance the skills without antagonizing people who are over invested in one technique or the other. It's amazing when you can just make stuff people want and get paid for it, but as soon as you do that, there's going to be someone else there showing up to find it, inventing something to be unhappy about or promising it to someone else to extract more value from it for themselves, and you get drawn into the same games again. Being smart about it is recognizing the cycle for what it is and setting personal boundaries that allow you to navigate without becoming a target.