ALM #055: 4 Essential Skills Every Engineering Manager Should Master
ALM #055: 4 Essential Skills Every Engineering Manager Should Master
The journey from developer to Engineering Manager is not always linear.
📖 Read Time: 3:30 minutes
The transition between being a developer and an Engineering Manager is complex and takes work.
You’re going to face a new set of realities, handed a series of uncomfortable scenarios and sooner or later, you’re going to have some pretty tricky conversations.
Today I’m going to show you the skills that you should develop if you want to embark on this journey of Engineering Management.
By mastering these skills, you’ll be more equipped to handle the ups and downs of leading a team and dealing with deadlines and stakeholders.
I’ve witnessed a lot of unequipped managers that, down the line, lead to dysfunctional teams, unhappy individuals and projects that never really gain any speed.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
Growth Mindset
The ability and willingness to continue to learn. The conscious reflection that you don’t hold all the knowledge in the universe.
Like when you are a developer learning new languages, new patterns, and avoiding anti-patterns), when you become an Engineering Manager, you must keep acquiring new skills and polishing existing ones.
To me, this willingness to learn and fail should be a significant feature of everyone moving from developer to manager.
The idea behind modern leadership is that Engineering Managers work alongside teams to help them deliver as much as possible, not by way of the whip but by collaboration.
And for this to work, you must be able and willing to learn, fail, evolve and try new things.
If you want to dive deeper into Growth Mindset, I wrote about it a few weeks ago.
Active Listening
When you’re in a conversation, it’s easy to tell when the other person has stopped listening to you and is just waiting their turn to speak.
Their eyes gaze, they become impatient, restless and, more often than not, they start nodding their head to pretend they’re listening.
By writing this, I can clearly picture a couple of people nodding. Can’t you?
To me, this always leads to a sense of dismissal and frustration. I knew I wasn’t being heard, and we were just going through the motions.
If you really want to dive deep into Engineering Management, one of the best skills you can work on is listening and genuinely making someone feel heard.
This leads to a deeper bond with your team and, more often than not, long-lasting connections.
Like so many other skills, listening can also be trained and improved. If you want to know more about it, I devoted this issue to Active Listening a couple of weeks ago.
Communication
You control the words you write and speak. You don’t control how they will be read or listened to.
Different teams from a series of companies and industries share the same feedback. More often than not, the communication practised at their company was not good.
A successful Engineering Manager can receive information, digest it, filter what needs filtering, and pass it along concisely and in a way that fits their team.
Language, emojis, gestures, and humour (or lack thereof) can be used to adapt a message to your team. Make it your own without losing the underlying significance.
We all know how poor communication can lead to tragic results. Sometimes you annoy people, or sometimes you even have people leaving. This is how the company of a friend of mine destroyed any chance their Agile Coaches had of making a difference just by lousy communication.
And this leads me to emotions.
Emotions
To finish, I want to discuss how important it is to leave emotion at the door.
Before you notice, you’ll be placed in the middle of a discussion and asked to take sides. Or you’ll need to deal with someone that takes a technical debate personally. Or be asked to decide who gets a salary bump. Or who to cut due to budgeting.
It would be best to distinguish emotion from care or empathy. Both can be done while following an important data-based approach.
Many managers build their decisions on just empirical data. That eventually leads to teams not clearly understanding why a particular decision was taken.
Be smart and cement your decision using precise data. It will position you as a fair leader who listens to reason more than just what’s hot or trendy.
I’ve written about what it takes to get promoted, how to check if your team is truly happy, how developers should write brag documents to help with their performance reviews and key metrics every Engineering Manager should read. I hope it helps.
In Summary
These 4 skills might be easy to understand and often common sense. What’s unusual is the number of managers that don’t use them or even have them on their radar.
Often I write the “How I became a better leader today” entry in my journal. It helps me reflect on what I did well and, more importantly, where to improve. This would also help you to improve your skills.
Remember, it’s only up to you to make a difference and become a better leader.
See you next week!
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Have an incredible week! 💪🏼
Parada 👊🏼 A Leader's Mindset