The impossible task of engineering managers

You need to achieve an impossible balance, in every single one of your behaviors:

• You need to be humble, but not passive.

• You need to talk enough that your team knows where you stand, but not too much otherwise they’ll stop paying attention.

• You need to rely on metrics to make decisions, but also pay attention to the hearts and minds of employees and customers.

And the list goes on.

Why it matters

If you are blind to that balancing act, you’ll lean too far in one direction. Sometimes, your biggest advantages can bring you down:

• Are you a great coder? Then you are probably too involved in the technical details, having a hard time delegating decisions to your developers.

• Are you good at taking ownership and covering for your people? Your team members probably have nothing left for which they can take ownership… They execute only at your specific direction, which results in a far less capable team.

• Are you close to your people? Then you probably avoid some difficult conversations, and will find it very hard to lay off people when the time comes.

My balancing act

Demanding AND caring. Those are the 2 words I would use to describe which kind of manager I want to be.

I care about my people, I really do. I want each of them to receive big raises every year, get promote and generally succeed. In addition, I have a personal connection with every single one of them. We talk about our personal lives, our struggles, our goals in life.

But I also want to set a high bar, and deliver exceptional results. When it’s time to have tough conversations, I always ‘soften up’ my delivery. When things get tough and extra work is needed, I hope they volunteer, or do it myself.

I’m getting better at it, but it’s a constant (and important!) struggle.

In The Dichotomy of Leadership, the authors covered it very well:

If leaders develop overly close relationships with their people, they may not be willing to make those people do what is necessary to complete a project or a task.

They may not have the guts to lay off individuals with whom they have relationships, even if it is the right move for the good of the company.

And some leaders get so close to their people that they don’t want to have hard conversations with them—they don’t want to tell them that they need to improve.

On the other hand, if a leader is too detached from the team, he or she may overwork, overexpose, or otherwise harm its members while achieving no significant value from that sacrifice.

The leader may be too quick to fire people to save a buck, thereby developing the reputation of not caring about the team beyond its ability to support the strategic goals. So leaders must find the balance.

They must push hard without pushing too hard. They must drive their team to accomplish the mission without driving them off a cliff.

Final words

The list of dichotomies is endless - each leader has their own balancing challenge to deal with.

What’s yours?

Hit reply, and promise to provide my thoughts on it.

What I enjoyed reading this week

1. Understand The 4 Shapes of Software Developers to Better Navigate Your Career by

   Petar Ivanov

2. So You Want To Become an Engineering Manager by

   Suresh Choudhary
   with his first post, good luck Suresh!

3. A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way by

   Lior Neu-ner
   - another new author I encountered this week, with a great article!