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Just now I have been promoted as Team lead and from Senior Web Developer. Actually I have been promoted due to my good technical knowledge, but now my managers expectation are very high as "Team Lead". The issue is that in my previous week I have given one task estimation and that estimation was judged as Over Estimate and now my manager has forgot my all good work and only recalling overestimation thing in each every discussion. I am feeling bad that how one mistake can erase all good things. Actually I want to learn the professional way to handle such situation.

So my question here is how to handle scenarios like on I mentioned above ?

How to handle project manager who is always on fire now?

I am loosing my interest of work due to this issue ?

Even she is criticizing now on my every task and judging me like a hell.(she is non technical)

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    Why is her view so important to you? And can you clarify what over estimate means? Did she think it was too high or did the project run over
    – Dave Battersby
    Dec 12, 2018 at 12:19
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    Were there any lasting complications from this over-estimate in other tasks or in allocating people/resources?
    – user34587
    Dec 12, 2018 at 12:19
  • @DaveBattersby: Over Estimate means I gave estimate of task as 3 weeks but that task could have been completed in 1 week.
    – Akki
    Dec 12, 2018 at 12:26
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    When you say "could have been completed in 1 week", does that mean "someone did do it in 1 week" or that someone thought it should have been done in one week? Also, does your project manager understand the meaning of the word "estimate"?
    – Erik
    Dec 12, 2018 at 12:53
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    @Erik : +999. Moreover, estimations turn out to be wrong in 75% cases as 50% of the painpoints are met during realization (dependancy ready in theory but not practice, provider not meeting deadline, resource catches flu, etc...)
    – Answers_Seeker
    Dec 12, 2018 at 13:17

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my managers expectation are very high as "Team Lead"

Promotions come with increased expectations - sometimes massively so. With great power and all that.

It's an unfortunate reality of human nature that first impressions matter, and it would appear that your first impression on the your manager as a new Team Lead..wasn't great. Add in that if your manager was one of the people who made the call to promote you then your mistakes also reflect on them as well.

To be honest your "mistake" wasn't that big a deal in my view - yeah you were out on an estimate by a significant margin but if you're going to be out by such a margin it's far, far better that it's an over estimate than the other way around. Honestly if you'd done the same thing in 6 months time it wouldn't have been anywhere near as big a "thing"

How to handle project manager who is always on fire now?

Unfortunately in the absence of a working time machine you can't go back and undo that - so the best thing to do going forward is to be whiter-than-white. Then if after a few weeks of you getting things (particularly estimations) spot-on (well, at least within closer margins - anyone expecting an estimation to be 100% accurate doesn't understand what the word means!) if they are still giving you a hard time over the previous mistake it would be fair to say

I realize I made a mistake in one of my first estimations but I think I've shown over the last X weeks that it really was a just a blip and that I'm capable of estimating well so can we move on from what is in the past please?

I am loosing my interest of work due to this issue ?

I don't say this to judge but if you're starting to give up this quickly are you sure you want to be in a leadership/managerial role? Like I say it's no judgement on you if you don't, it's not a case of being "better" or "worse" it's a matter of whether it's suited to you and what's going to give you the best work life for you.

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The issue is that in my previous week I have given one task estimation and that estimation was judged as Over Estimate and now my manager has forgot my all good work and only recalling overestimation thing in each every discussion. I am feeling bad that how one mistake can erase all good things.

They have not forgotten. However, the roles you are in are changed now, whereas as a developer senior or not, your quality is perceived in terms of work done as a team lead your quality is perceived in terms of the work the team does.

Your manager's quality is perceived in terms of the work that all his team leads do. So by picking up on something that is (percieved as) an overestimate and reminding you of it, they are trying to get you to give lower estimates for you and your team and essentially to get your team to do more work.

In short, they are playing games and manipulating you. It would be interesting to see how the work you underestimated actually came out in terms of effort and quality once it was done.

The best way to counter this is with hard facts, look at your teams' estimates and effort, calculate how accurate they are on average. Use that to look at how future estimates are done. So next time your Manager uses this one issue to pressure you you can say that on average estimates come out X% accurate.

Also if your manager is any good, they will know that estimating work is never a science people will use their understanding of the problem and past experience to do a best guess. A manager who expects every estimate to be accurate is not a very good manager. You could start to remind them of this if they push too hard.

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Where I'm from, we'd just check that behavior with a joke about the manager consistently bringing it up, or we'd just mention a few things the manager fouled up to get them to stop.

Both of these things are about as bad as the other. You could also just ask your manager to stop harping on your estimate - an informed guess by definition.

You're allowed to push tactfully back in the workplace. You don't have to just sit there and take it. Just stay away from things in poor taste; don't make fun of your managers gender or any other protected status in the USA.

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