When it comes to reading online about how to become a successful engineering manager or leader, it often feels like we hear the same things over and over again.
We’re told to embrace servant leadership, communicate clearly, deliver quality work on time and within budget, foster collaborations with other departments, and so on.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these are all valid points. But they can sometimes sound like buzzwords to me. Will having all these qualities alone make you a loved leader? Or will they “only” guarantee you career advancement, promotions, and praise?
What about becoming the kind of leader that your employees don’t want to quit, someone they fully trust and are inspired by?
That’s the kind of leader I strive to be for all my engineers.
The glory, promotions, and praise will likely come if you truly embody other qualities that are more human and emotionally connected.
And let me tell you, if you’re only in it for the glory and prizes, my friend, you’ve chosen the wrong path. You’ll probably have to deal with internal competition, with others ready to take your place on the throne 🙂
For this first part of the series The Kind Engineering Manager we will cover a very important quality for a leader:
❤️ Don’t give up on anyone ❤️
Everyone knows that feeling as a team lead. It happens from time to time to any of us while managing teams. You are working towards some goals to be shipped on time and within budget and suddenly one of your engineer is underperforming.
Unusual from her/him you might think at first. However the situation doesn’t change and weeks pass by.
The involved engineer might or might not reach out to ask for help or clarification.
Most of the times, todos are overwhelming your day to day and you probably hope that things will fix on its own, in a way or the other.
But, guess what?
They will not 🙂
Things will most probably get worse and new issues will stack on each other until your tower of illusion will collapse.
What’s happening here is that you are, unconsciously, giving up on someone.
Sounds pretty bad isn’t it?
Well it is indeed :)
Your hope or intuition that things will soon get better are in most cases either a lack of experience on how to act or a laziness to genuinely support someone who might be currently lost and in need of guidance.
Additionally, an evil compound effect might be exploding in front of your very own face 🥸
Some natural/usual next steps of a neglected underperformance are:
The involved engineer will become idle, a lonely island without clear instructions The team will suffer in the shipped quality The team might start talking and chatting on the possible causes for the obvious underperformance Other team members might feel entitled in lowering their quality of work as well The involved engineer might quit
As an engineering leader it is your responsibility to understand root causes for the poor performance, offer needed support and guidance to solve the issues and restore the productive ecosystem in an engineering team to continue on building and shipping quality.
I have the romantic vision that every engineer, especially in the realm of software development, is an amazing freaking-creative builder which leads me to believe that a significant drop in quality shipped for sure has ways to be fixed in order to let each builder shine again and enjoy what we love doing most:
Building great software to enhance people’s life ❤️
What can you do when you realise one of your engineer seems lost or his/her quality drops drastically?
(1:1s but also ad-hoc sessions) to talk about the current situation. PLEASE: Never start with a negative note and always offer a supportive tone to understand and explore root causes
Some of them could be directly connected with the work environment, other not
After the supportive sessions to spot root causes are offered, assess that your support is delivering its expected result.
Work or non-work related, it might take some time to get back on track. The important bit here is to acknowledge and celebrate success and continuous improvements. The involved engineer should understand you are smelling a wind of change. This will speed up the healing and will double down on the effect of your offered support
Create your own “libraries” of issues and situations your engineers will have, share those (anonymously) with other leaders and learn from each other. With the time passing you will always be fast in offering support and unblocking engineers undergoing different road blockers
Quite some work isn’t it? :D
well I never said it was would have been easy.
Being a kind manager & not giving up on anyone requires a lot time, attention and energy.
But it’s very satisfying!
In short:
Namaste ❤️