In your shoes I would have an earnest conversation with the top people on the team, and see if they have any aspirations for management. Once watched a new pos

In your shoes I would have an earnest conversation with the top people on the team, and see if they have any aspirations for management. Once watched a new position grow from a manager who wanted more hands-on time and an engineer who wanted to see what it was like to lead: the engineer became the new manager, and the old manager became the 'team lead'. IMO it worked great because now I had two people to go to for specific concerns: technical stuff to the team lead, HR stuff to the manager.