I think your understanding of the job is accurate. You just don't like the nature of the job and the lack of clarity. Here are my best guesses re pending issues.
Thanks for the lengthy response. I had to turn in my review last week, and I basically stated the things that you recommended (how I was supporting my staff, helping them to grow, giving them the resources they need to respond quickly to issues, etc.). I wanted to throw up when I went back and reviewed what I had written ;). I'll try to keep your ideas in mind as I go about my daily routine.
Glad it was helpful!
When I became a manager, I really had no idea what being a manager meant. And since my boss has never told me what I'm expected to do, I've just been making it up as I go along. I must say that putting people who have no idea what they're supposed to be doing into management roles doesn't seem like the greatest strategy for the long-term success of a company.
It doesn't, does it? My favorite business professor told me that studies have shown the most fundamental problem in workplaces is systems in which people don't know what they're supposed to do.
He also gave the definition of a manager's role re their team that you have recognized for yourself - the person who gets them their tools, training, safe working environment, etc. So presumably you are on track.
If you will permit one more response, though - my original training was in sociology. From that, plus your description of how your team grew, I suspect that there is a different and more benign pattern in your workplace that should be recognized. Specifically, perhaps your company operates on an unspoken principle of recognizing and rewarding competence.
That it's unspoken is clearly confusing to you. But as a principle, prioritizing competent people over detailed explicit protocols has its merits for an organization. They include:
1. Freedom to work efficiently instead of following suboptimal procedures.
2. Maximizing the impact of competence wherever competence exists.
3. Reducing the costs of excessive documentation (which some people HATE by the way)
4. Increasing personal involvement (maybe not a big thing for you, but many people hate feeling like robots at their job. This item could at least reduce turnover)
5. Greater flexibility to adjust to changing conditions.
6. Tends to reward intelligent hardworking people instead of the meticulous idiots who sometimes rise in more structured systems
If my guess about your workplace is correct, several positive aspects about your team's history should be noticed (some of these are speculative):
A. Your belief that when they named you manager they were giving an excuse to pay you a manager's salary may be correct. Equally true, they value your skills and have taken care to reward them financially. When/if you job search, be aware that many companies do not do this.
B. They may also have planned at that point to add more people under you, but just not been ready to move them yet.
C. Perhaps the company's commitment to competence was such that they like having bit of unused talent available at the management level as a safety valve into which other managers' overtask can be drained when appropriate. They knew that they would eventually put some people under you.
D. The timeline wasn't immediate because you're a utility, not the center of the plans. They put people under you on their own timeline. Doesn't mean your job is unimportant or poorly planned, just that they trust and expect you to accept the timeline without taking up bandwidth.
E. They assume competence includes the ability to handle the changes without taking up upper management bandwidth. Confusing for you, and maybe not optimal, but still a legitimate implementation of the "competence is king" principle.
F. Perhaps when they made you manager, they weren't sure how many people they would put under you. They just knew that paying you fairly and having the chance to try you out was worth the money. In this case, they liked the results their experiment, and have happily added people as time progresses. More could be on the way, get ready!
G. Maybe the plan wasn't detailed, but they will keep adding more if your success creates the opportunity.
The last couple of points remind me of an excellent manager I once worked for. This individual started out entry level and was promoted repeatedly, eventually supervising hundreds of people in a facility responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. No one knew this would happen. She just ran her teams so well that she kept getting promoted. As an employee, I noticed that it was uplifting to work there because people were implicitly respected, given adequate tools, allowed to grow into their roles, and expected to perform well.
It is possible to have a whole teams or even companies function very well based on rewarding competence at the expense of structure. At size, a company needs some of each, of course. Obviously your firm's lack of clarity is personally frustrating for you. I just wanted to outline that the lack of definition isn't necessarily a moral failing or even a fatal flaw on the company's part. Rather, it could be just a suboptimal side effect of a positive principle.
Obviously you don't have to agree (or stop job searching, or anything else). But if you have other things going on in your life, and the above gives you any peace so that you can focus on one issue at a time instead of trying to pile big career changes on top of personal ones, I will be glad if you feel you can make changes at your own pace.