Tag: management
-
What’s Your Job as an Engineering Manager?
As a manager, maybe you start your day looking at your calendar, or the pings that are already piling up. It can be easy to get caught up in what people are asking of you – but your job needs to look beyond the requests and into the causes underlying them. Here’s what I think…
-
Announcing: The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
One of the biggest issues I saw running remote teams for the past decade+ was the lack of good engineering manager training. With a global team it’s harder (and more expensive) to get everyone in the same place at one time. With a small team, the cost of doing anything custom is infeasible. To help…
-
Decisions
Recently, someone asked me for my “Leadership philosophy”. My initial reaction was to panic, but after taking a deep breath and a bit of time to think, I came up with this answer: “My job is to make it easier for people to make good decisions.” What does that mean? Firstly – that my job…
-
Questions for the End of a 1:1
I have a set of questions I ask in some variation at the end of my 1:1s. What are you taking away?What was most useful to you? These two I got from my coach and I use them both at work and in my own coaching. The concrete questions are useful, but it can also…
-
What Makes a Good Team?
No team is perfect, but I think it’s often kind of obvious when a team is bad – there’s usually a level of chaos or drama, a sense that they can’t be relied on or don’t really deliver the value that the organization needs. I think it’s also quite obvious when a team is good,…
-
Escaping The House Elf Management Trap
I would love to find a new name for this, now that JK Rowling is cancelled, but in the Harry Potter books, house elves are powerful magical beings, who are condemned to (mostly invisible) servitude, largely of people who would uphold harmful power structures (much like JK Rowling herself). The tragedy of the house elf…
-
Meta Problems and Where to Find Them
Meta-problem (n): root cause issues of a collection of symptom problems. One of the things I do as an engineering director, is live in the realm of the meta problem. The thing that is behind the problems that people are talking about. For instance, a meta problem of an individualistic mindset on the team might…
-
The Anatomy of a 1:1
Broadly speaking, my overarching agenda for any 1:1 is as follows: It starts with the checkin, “how’s it going?”, an open ended question that some people respond with a status update, and some do not. The important thing is what comes next – finding out how the person feels. Sometimes a status update is useful…
-
Energy Management for Newer Managers
When I coach new managers, or transition ICs into management, one of the key struggles initially (which I also remember myself) is overwhelm. For some, this ends up in exhaustion, and those are the people who often switch back onto the IC path – they find management unsustainable at that time (some return to it…