An important reminder for all new managers out there: Simply having “manager” in your title does not mean you’re an effective leader.
With the volatile hiring environment caused by the Great Resignation, many workers are demanding more opportunities at their current companies or from prospective employers — and that includes climbing the corporate ladder. In an effort to retain employees and attract new ones, independent contributors are being given the opportunity to become managers, supervisors to become directors, and so forth.
Naturally, there are knowledge gaps when taking a new role. Knowing how certain team members work or how meetings are run takes time to understand and, more importantly, change if they’re not working.
Yet if those knowledge gaps aren’t eventually learned, they can amount to blind spots, a topic leadership consultant Robert Bruce Shaw wrote about extensively in his 2014 book, “Leadership Blindspots.”
“The role played by blindspots is to meditate between the poles of self-confidence and self-doubt,” Shaw writes. “A leader with too many blindspots can be overconfident, even blindly arrogant, and exposed to a range of risks.”
The easiest way to see your blind spots is to go into the future and learn from your mistakes. The second easiest? Talking to managers who have gone through the transition and have learned what works and what doesn’t.
Below, two local engineering leaders shared the lessons they’ve learned in their roles and the advice they have for new and veteran managers alike.
Define What Success Means for You
I spent at least the first 15 years of my career as a software engineer, slinging code. The biggest paradigm shift for me when I first started out as an engineering manager was having nothing tangible to show for a hard day’s work — no fresh unit tests, no PR, no shiny new feature to put my name on.
It’s a hard switch to go from maker to manager, when for much of your career you measured a successful day by how much code you wrote, how many stickies you moved across your team’s Kanban board, or how well a new feature can engage your teammates. Those things are real and tangible, and because of that, it’s so clear to see and feel your productivity as a maker.
Some good advice for budding engineering managers coming from an individual contributor role is that your workday, and how you measure a successful day, will be different. As a manager, your success will no longer be measured by such tangible things as commits, closed tickets or features, but rather by your ability to serve your team — their code, their features, their growth, their happiness, and ultimately, their success.
Collin Brewer is an engineering manager at Pushnami, an omnichannel subscriber engagement and messaging platform.
Delegate Early to Avoid Causing Roadblocks
One of the most important things I learned after transitioning from a lead engineer to an engineering manager was the need to quickly devise a strategy for effectively delegating tasks to the team you are managing. Becoming a manager brings with it a new set of tasks you’ll need to prioritize, and so the systems and processes you used to maintain as a lead engineer start to quickly fall by the wayside as you adapt how you budget your time. However, the need to maintain those systems remains, and without anyone dedicated to owning that work, inevitably you will run into an issue. If you wait until an issue has already arisen to realize the need for delegation, you’ll only end up causing friction between you and the team you are managing.
Creating a plan to delegate the systems you used to own as a lead engineer as early on in your transition as possible reduces the chance for roadblocks when questions or issues naturally arise involving those systems. It also provides you with a chance to start having conversations about career growth within your team as you look to find the right people to take on some of the responsibilities that you used to own.
Michael Larson is the director of engineering at Worksmith, a software-enabled facilities management marketplace.
