lessons Ive learned as EM
Lesson:
You need to embrace conflict. Conflict will keep happening all through your career as an engineering manager, and with your emotional courage, and a calm attitude towards it, you can lead by example, and guide your team to adopt a culture to embrace conflict in a healthy manner.
Lesson:
You need to stop being an avoider of feedback conversations, and difficult conversations.
Your job is to care for the people working with you, and you care about them by giving them feedback. This is important especially if a culture of feedback and learning is not a common lived practice in your organization.
You need to build emotional courage, drive the feedback conversation, be comfortable with the messy nature of the conflict.
Lesson:
Managing is also teaching people how to change their working habits so that the outcome of their actions gets them to a better place, together.
Managing is educating, guiding, and before anything, learning from and with every team member, yourself, and all together as a unit.
To be a good manager you need to be a good learner yourself.
Communicating efficiently is a skill that you always keep learning
Lesson:
If meta-communication is a thing, that’s what you need to be doing all the time.
Structure your communication, so that is precise, concise, clear, and from within that precision, it communicates the now of what the direction of the whole team has their purpose.
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Lesson:
The first lesson I have learned is to think tactically before I can think strategically.
This does not mean that I forget about strategy, this means that keeping the strategy in mind, keeping the vision of where we are going in mind, I can focus on the tactics, the problems of today.
My head is full of unorganized information and it makes me uncomfortable to have it all there unorganized. I feel I am missing something.
Lesson:
Communicate progress, current state is better than communicating nothing at all. I don't have to have all the answers so that I communicate things, I don't have to have framed the problem to say something. It is good enough to say: "Hey I know there is a problem, I am processing it, I don’t have answers yet"
Lesson:
Lead by giving something you never had
I never had a good leader, I never had a mentor since I started my career path as an engineering manager.
My way to lead therefore is to lead by giving something I never had. Listening to people, guiding them into learning how to do stuff, how to lead, how to navigate this software world.
Doing it from a place of love, peace, calmness.
Lesson:
Your job is to frame problems, give guidance, give feedback, have difficult conversations, be the lead that you never had.
Lesson:
The problems you solve as a manager of people are abstract, you never have the full information, there is no science behind it that tells you this is the way to do it.
The scope of the problems that you have to solve when being an engineering manager is abstract, undefined, and very often politically driven, especially when powerful people and stakeholders come to play.
Therefore as a manager, you have abstract problems, that you start defining, framing, narrowing down.
Lesson:
Therefore, onboarding a new manager is abstract. Is a lot of guiding them to how to land, how can they be efficient, how can they come and help you.
You have to transfer a bunch of abstract information.
Lesson:
You need first to listen to where your team is, understand the context, and walk exactly at their pace. While you do that, you introduce Incremental guided change and guided continuous improvement, so that you, all together go further. Faster does not matter, remember the story of tio conejo y tia tortuga?
How do you ensure that the problems that you solve today, the places where you put your energy, are solving the issues that your team has in the long term?
How do you give guidance, so that the actions that your team takes, add incrementally to a place where there are solutions?
Lesson:
Solve the problems of today, incrementally, and in a guided manner.
Dont dream to follow methodologies that have been defined in books. They won't help you 1:1 because they lack context. Remember when you studied all the beautiful practices you do in software engineering, which dont happen in real world? Well, this is the same, but applied to software methodologies and delivery.
Lesson:
Your job is creative, the principles and ideas are there, your job is to find creative ways to frame them and communicate them, so that you encourage people.
Lesson:
Your next step is to solve the burning problem. You learn what the burning problem is by talking to people and listening what they have to say.
Lesson:
Adjust your expectations, being a manager of multiple people, in charge of setting directions and actions, is something that takes time to adapt.
Understanding who you are as a manager, how you adapt your style depending on the circumstances, and especially, understanding what the actions are you need to take in order to get your people to walk together into a solution: That is work.
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Lessons:
Time management is very important. Keep times in meetings, be on time, keep an agenda, bring back people to the topic at hand, and more importantly: Take breaks. You need to be calm, and in peace so that you can be efficient, be a good leader, and do a good job. If it takes for you to take 2h walk a day, so be it, that’s you.
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Lesson:
Your mental health is the first focus you have. Make it your priority, to be happy and calm, and if your current environment does not allow it, then change it.
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Lesson:
Your job is not your identity. If you can’t stop thinking about work outside working hours, if you can’t disconnect, raise your red flag, and work actively to improve on that.
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Lesson:
People most likely don’t know how to frame problems, you might/will need to help them to do so by asking questions, and once they nailed it, ask them what they will do about it.