You wear two hats. One hat is team-facing, the other is management-facing. To the team, you are the team lead and keep things running smoothly. The team doesn't hear management's stupid ideas or pressures unless they are a risk to folks' jobs or the projects overall. When facing management, it's 100% about bullshitting on performance and making sure those people feel good and are happy when you're talking to them. Underpromisr. Overdeliver. Hype up your team's work. You can balance the you vs. your team impression purely in terms of impressions and how you sell work that is already done.

In terms of balance between you and your team, this depends a lot on how brainwormed the rest of management is. Some places have a somewhat healthy mindset that if you're doing your job, your team is doing 90%+ of the direct work on deliverables. Other places promote narcissism among management by creating an environment where you only succeed if you can personally take credit. Your only way to sus this out is to talk to other people in management all the time and make "work buddies" with people that will feed you information. Go to the stupid management party at the bar or whatever. Have people over for dinner. It's terrible, but this strategy is basically just dealing with the reality of work being a petty fiefdom and you've gotta manage your place in court undet the feudal lord. The reality of leading a team well and what you present to management are two separate worlds with a bridge between them. When in doubt, assume that you need to do self-promotion, including promoting your team. Literally say, "[X important thing] wouldn't have been possible if X, Y, Z people didn't jump on it like they did. Our team really kerps this place productive. Look at how we made line go up." If you tell people what to think, they will often believe you.

In terms of being cool and not just being a tool for capital, the best thing you can do is lobby for more funding + pay + better working conditions for your group (call it "being competitive" and "retaining talent", which only works if your team is perceived as generating value). The next best thing you can do is shield them from layoffs by lobbying for your team being essential and by giving your team early info so they can start looking for other jobs (this will backfire if someone rats you out btw).

In your manager office there should be a cartoonishly large button that says “communism”. Press that.

But really you seem like a good person who won’t take advantage of other people. It’s okay to ask people to do the work they’re hired to do and that they probably expect to be doing. I’d say the best you can do in your position is to not be overbearing with the people you work with and treat them with respect and stuff.

The problem is I have to balance the work I do myself and the work I assign to other people. If I keep too much for myself then my bosses wonder why they keep the others around and they fire the peons and I get stuck with all the work. If I assign too much to the people below me then they wonder why I'm even around and I get put at risk of being fired.

Always complain about how busy you are and how overworked your team is

My opinion as a shitposter; if you can't hire or fire people you're not really a manager. You're a supervisor or team lead or something. Are they switching you from hourly to salary? Sometime's the make people a "manager" bc they can use that to put you on a salary that's lower than your hourly would be.

run your department as a democratic centralist council.

but actually just be sure not to exploit your people, make it clear you are there to support them, ask for feedback and bring them into decision making processes. don't make your decisions a black box, keep things transparent. and subtly radicalize your team. eventually "my cool responsive boss is a communist" will change the way they think about communism.

Biggest pet peeve for me: Don't implement sweeping changes without discussing it with your team first.

defend your team to the nines against management

undermine management as much as possible to your team

allow your team as much involvement in decision-making as possible while keeping this secret from management above you

I interact with a lot of different types managers in my line of work and all the good ones/least leech-y ones understand that the hierarchy is pointless. If I go to them with a problem they’ll approach it as a coworker looking to find a way to get the job done together with us (the workers out on site), rather than someone who just delegates to another person who delegates it another person who delegates it etc. or be that manager who just says ‘figure it out’ or ‘how does this affect the deadline’ then vanish into thin air unable to be reached.

Not to say that delegating is wrong, or that there are no times where you have to be tough, but shit rolls down hill and the most bloodsucking managers I’ve ever worked will gladly let us deal with that shit (because we have to) rather than stopping it and easing our workload a bit.

Personally, it is the difference between me telling a manager to their face to fuck off/suck my dick/whatever and me willing to always work with someone again

all you have to do is not snitch if theres whispers of a union and try to be a fair and just person. dont stress too much.

Tell your minions whatever upper management is telling you/signalling. If you suspect a re-org, increased expectations, increased performance based firings, etc. are going to happen, hint it to them offline so you can warn them without getting in trouble

Make it seem like everything your team is working on is more difficult than expected. Somebody is behind schedule? There were unforeseen complexities that we recently discovered. Somebody finished on time/early? They worked extremely hard and moved mountains to make it happen

If I keep too much for myself then my bosses wonder why they keep the others around and they fire the peons and I get stuck with all the work. If I assign too much to the people below me then they wonder why I'm even around and I get put at risk of being fired.

I would say that if you're worrying about this, then you've already made the first step towards doing it correctly. At a previous job I was a "working manager" like this and I wrote the names of everyone in the shop and what they were doing on a white board in the office every morning, the chart included me and I made an effort to always be assigning myself tasks using the same process I did for everyone else and keeping everything transparent. Everyone knew what everyone else's workload was and so everyone knew that everyone was doing about the same amount of work, and as they completed tasks and I inspected them I would check it off or strike it through to give a nice visual indication to anyone who walked in that work was getting done.

I was terrible at dealing with the higher ups though so read the other comment for that lmao.

understand the Peter Principle and don't take too many promotions.

I hated being a supervisor for the short period i was. Just be cool and show them you're not a micromanager but stay on top of what your manager wants. Open door policy, I don't want anybody that I'm working with hating me for some b******* I have to do because the capitalist Market makes me do it. Paycheck and all blah blah blah. Obviously do the best you can but throw the higher ups under the bus anytime it's convenient. It's probably their fault anyway

Make sure to have a system for assigning work fairly, everything else is pretty out of your control.