The Pillars
We discuss the non-negotiable foundations engineering managers need.
Hi, this is Peter with the next edition of the Professional Manager newsletter. I publish this newsletter to illustrate what decent, seasoned, professional engineering management could look like.
The Foundations
As discussed in this newsletter, a professional engineering manager (EM) must possess a wide variety of skills and maintain an exhaustive set of tools in their toolbox to be an effective EM with whom people want to work. We will sharpen our tools in the toolbox!
Before we get to work, though, let’s establish solid foundations. What we will discuss in this edition are the non-negotiables, the table stakes, the foundational pillars. Whatever you call them, they are the things you should have solidly in place.
Be Authentic
Throughout my career, I have always been myself - for better and worse. I have always thought that the only way I could lead a team was by being abundantly authentic and unapologetically myself.
There was a time in the HomeAway days when the company told us to “bring your whole self to work.” While I appreciated the sentiment, some took this as permission to be a complete jerk or to belch in the middle of meetings and chalk up these unfortunate traits to “bringing our whole selves to work.” This behavior is not what I refer to when I say Be Authentic!
The best advice I have is to be yourself at work, don’t try to emulate someone else’s style. People will see through an inauthentic leader, quickly eroding trust. How could it not if the team cannot know which part of you is genuine? Being authentic at work will make it more enjoyable and less exhausting for you to be at work.
Inauthentic Igor
I wanted to introduce you to Inauthentic Igor who struggled as the new engineering leader at one of my previous employers. When he was introduced to our engineers, he proudly declared his engineering prowess and told us that he would take on any of us in a leetcode-type challenge. In that meeting, someone asked Igor to demonstrate reversing a linked list. All Igor could say was, “set up some time with me 1:1, and I’ll show you.” At the introductory all-hands meeting Igor showed signs of inauthenticity. He did not need to try to be the brightest brain in the room. He could’ve authentically said something along the lines of “Happy to be here, I look forward to working with you.”
Things only deteriorated from this first all-hands meeting.
I later learned that he had been using his previous boss’ all-hands content about what motivated him to come to work. Igor presented this material as his own, including YouTube videos we watched together awkwardly, and tried to get all of us excited about work with a message that was not his own. It all fell flat, and Igor’s all-hands meetings, YouTube videos, and team chants never came through authentically and did not motivate us. One day, Igor’s ex-boss came to town and presented the eerily similar material, but in an authentic fashion, without YouTube videos, purely from his heart, in a way that resonated with our engineering population.
Start with trust
You will hear me say that great engineering leaders are useless if they cannot build, lead, and retain a strong team. Trusting the team members is the best way to develop and maintain that team. If you cannot trust your team, how will you lead them through the challenges you may encounter together?
Trust can manifest in so many ways. Trusting them
to take care of themselves.
to look after the best interest of the business.
to do the right thing.
to bring the best versions of themselves in those critical weeks before launch.
to represent you and the rest of the team in front of customers and executives.
The ability to trust becomes even more crucial when you’re managing managers and directors.
Create psychological safety
There is a lot of material out there stressing the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. Amy Edmondson has a famous TED Talk; William Kahn researched this topic. Psychological safety is based on trust and respect, and the belief that you can take a risk and not be penalized for it.
Creating a psychologically safe environment can show up in many forms. Just a few methods that have worked for me in the past:
Creating a learning culture
Celebrating mistakes people make
Leaders asking more trivial questions at large forums
Apologizing
Always seeking feedback from your team
Being ok with healthy conflict
This last point is critical. Sometimes we mistake the absence of healthy conflict with harmony. Instead, this absence may be a sign of unhealthy groupthink, complacency, or apathy.
Support your team in their pursuit of physical and mental well being
Work is important. Hopefully, we each have meaningful lives outside of work. Mainly because “your career is not your life,” as Derek Thompson of the Atlantic observes.
According to the website 80,000 Hours, the typical career is just that: 80,000 hours long. That’s an almost unfathomable amount of time. But life is long too. The typical person is alive for slightly more than 4,000 weeks and awake and conscious for the equivalent of 3,000 weeks. When you do the basic math on 80,000 hours, you discover that the average career is roughly the equivalent of 480 sleepless weeks of labor. A little bit more math and you realize that the typical person has five waking hours of not working for every one hour of their career.
As a manager, you must support your team members’ physical and mental well-being outside of work. We need to look after our colleagues in good times and bad. Providing authentic, caring support for your colleagues to take care of themselves will bring you closer together and help your team members be their best selves at work.
It sometimes surprises me that such a self-explanatory topic still needs to be mentioned, and leaders forget that work is not the only thing on the minds of the employees.
One way to support your employees is to lead by example and…
Practice single focus
Don’t sweat your SLA’s with async communication (eg, Slack)
Prioritize taking care of your loved ones
Take vacations and completely unplug
Take the company-provided parental leave
We will go over the value of leading by example on this front in an upcoming newsletter.
Summary
In this edition, we discussed the foundational elements of being an effective manager. The pillars we discussed were
Authenticity
Trust
Psychological Safety
Supporting physical and mental well being