TNT is experiencing some growth, and in engineering this is creating the need for more management. In any company, when you need more management, you either shift some folks from individual tasks to partial or full management, or you bring in someone new from the outside. In a startup like TNT, this decision is particularly crucial.
In a startup, where in most cases you are strapped for people, every individual has crucial responsibilities. If you shift someone to management, then you are reducing the time and energy they have for individual tasks. While team members may want to gain management experience, the trade-off may not be acceptable for the overall product and company (unlike a bigger company where the results of individual changes can more easily be absorbed). Also, appointing someone a manager over someone else who was previously a peer is always a bit risky, but can be really prickly in a small team in a small company (it usually means a raise, for instance, and in a startup the salaries and raises are necessarily limited).
But if you bring in someone from the outside, then you risk upsetting team chemistry and frustrating key team members who wanted to manage themselves. Again, in a startup, team chemistry is particularly crucial.
When natural leaders have emerged within an existing team, they may be able to assume part of the management responsibilities without upsetting team chemistry or productivity. We've done this successfully at TNT and I've seen this done quite successfully elsewhere in the past. The natural leaders are not necessarily the most experienced people on the staff, but they're the ones with the best combination of experience and drive, and who in various situations have demonstrated leadership skills and who have come to be seen by the team itself as leaders.
But when no natural leaders emerge in areas that need more management, my experience is that it's better to look outside than to try to groom someone inside into the manager role (I'm saying this specifically for startups -- in a more mature company I would offer different advice).
Needless to say, this is a crucial hire and must be made extremely carefully. The key, I believe, is that the team respect the individual. In an engineering team, this means that the manager must be at least as intelligent as the team members, and must clearly have more experience in the specific area that would qualify them as a manager. During interviews, if this is not clearly the case, and if questions remain about the candidate, then it's better to keep looking. With individual contributors even in a startup you can take some risk, but with a manager (even the manager of a small team) you need to be sure.
