What I most appreciate in people, as an Engineering Manager

5 non-technical areas you can develop yourself in

As an engineering manager responsible for around 20 individual contributors (Software Engineers, DevOps, QA’s, UX Designers, Analysts), I learned to appreciate certain traits in people. Traits I, as an individual contributor, did not truly understand the importance of.

Therefore, to all individual contributors out there (and probably others too), hereby the 5 major areas I learned to appreciate in people. If you improve them, I guarantee your peers and your manager will appreciate you more than they do now, your interactions with others will become more meaningful and your career will benefit.

Communicate effectively

It’s better to over communicate, than to not communicate. Keep people informed of the progress you are making, the impediments you have, ask for help.

If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification. If someone asks you for help, take the time to give support.

Set reasonable expectations. When you say “this will be done today!”, you create strong expectations. When you fail to deliver on those expectations several times (and you will…), people lose trust in you. I suggest you give the message in a softer way, such as “I should be able to finish it today, if no unexpected obstacles arise”.

Be proactive

Don’t just sit and wait for work to come your way. Are you done with your work? Tell it to the team, offer your help to the others.

Also, don’t wait for problems to be solved on their own. Recently, team members of the department I am a member of raised concerns about lack of alignment between teams, they didn’t know what other teams were working on and management should do something to solve the problem. Management can indeed help, but if every team member would take some time to walk to other teams and talk with them, or have lunch with them, do you think lack of alignment would be a problem?

Take matters into your own hands.

Take responsibility

I don’t appreciate working with people who don’t take ownership and responsibility. “This isn’t my problem”, “the other guy did it”, “it was already like this and I don’t want to change it”, “we inherited this“, “our product is on fire but it’s 5 o’clock so bye!”*, etc etc. This kind of attitude does not help improving the product, the team, the department, and ultimately the organization. Take responsibility for your product and help making it better!

*I’m not advocating people should work overtime, I’m a strong believer of working only office hours for being able to maintain a sustainable pace, but if your product is on fire you should take your share of the responsibility and stand with your team to help.

Develop yourself

IT is an area that moves at a high pace. Unlike other engineering areas that have been around for hundreds of years, IT is still very new and has a lot of margin to grow. In order to keep up with the constant evolution (new tools, new frameworks, new ways of deploying and running applications), people need to develop themselves continuously.

But also (and most importantly), develop your soft skills. Work shifted from people sitting in cubicles working alone, to highly collaborative Agile teams. This new way of working requires strong soft skills that can and should be continuously developed.

Save time for personal development. Ask for trainings. Make sure you are always improving yourself and your skills.

Be professional

Simple things like being punctual, communicating clearly to your manager and your peers when you are in the office or working remotely, informing people in advance of when you are planning to take holidays, etc, are very much appreciated. They make you come across more trustworthy, remove confusion, help others anticipate issues.

If you notice, almost everything above is about soft skills. That’s what I didn’t understand in my younger years, as an individual contributor. I was much more focused on learning new technical skills and not really focused on developing myself as a all. Had I discovered this earlier, I could have delivered a lot more value for my employers, built better relationships with my peers and accelerated my career development.

Keep in mind this is based on my own experience and heavily biased by the Dutch culture. Other cultures may not appreciate some of these traits as much as I do.