Managing People 101: How to Grow Your Engineers
In an article I previously wrote, I talked about the transition of the job description and the required mindset when an individual contributor is promoted to a managerial position based on my experience managing people at Cermati. One of the reasons I wrote that was to share my point of view and experience to one of my direct reports — Michael Aditya Sutiono, or Mike as we usually call him — who was promoted to a lead position not too long before this article was written.
One of the most important jobs of a manager is growing the people they manage. In this article, I’m going to share my views and experience on how to grow people based on some of my discussions with Mike in our one-on-one sessions throughout this year on how to grow our team members.
Different people can have different managerial styles. I myself identify best with the concept of wu wei — action through inaction, which is a central philosophy in Taoism.
In a modern term, especially in this age of hustle culture, you can say that I’m a lazy bum of a manager. I tend to get involved mostly in the initial phases when the general direction for the people hasn’t been established and try helping to establish it. Afterward, I usually just sit back and watch whatever happens as they’re working on the job that’s handled to them.
I generally try to help if needed while doing my best to stay out of their way. I might be getting somewhat rusty in a lot of cases due to lack of practice and lack of technical focus in the context of my day-to-day job, which risks me causing more problems than I’m solving if I insist on getting my hands dirty. As a disclaimer, I’m kind of stupid and awkward in my day-to-day routine.
Because of that, I spend quite a lot of time observing how people in my team deal with the problems they face on a day-to-day basis — and how they work in general. I then contemplate about what I observed and try to think how they can be even better according to their strengths and interests — I generally avoid pushing people towards the areas that are not very well-aligned with their strengths and interests because it’s way easier to just build on top of what they already have (wu wei, baby!).
In order to do that, I need to be reasonably knowledgeable in their areas of interest so I also spend quite a lot of time listening to random podcasts and reading random books that might help me understand their perspectives and interests better. One-on-one sessions are also extremely helpful to learn from them, I learned many valuable things from my direct reports during the one-on-one sessions — some of them even taught me on topics I never bothered to explore before.
When helping other people grow within their professional context, there are a few things that we can look at in order to help them plan their career progression. The ones I mentioned in this article might not cover everything, but these are what I usually try to check when working with my team.
Identifying the Potentials
The first thing that we need to understand when developing people is their potentials. In order to identify their potentials, we first need to get familiar with their aspirations, interests, traits, and current skillsets. That information should point to a general direction for their growth.
Note which areas they’re strong at and which areas are still underdeveloped in regards to their aspirations and goals. The areas irrelevant to their present goals and aspirations can be revisited at some point later once these areas become relevant.
From here, we can try to come up with a plan on how to work with them and bring the best out of them.
We usually try to assess the potentials of the engineers at the beginning, when we’re interviewing them during the hiring process since we need to plan what kind of work we should assign to them after they’re hired. But since people change and grow over time — and we might also miss a lot of things during the initial assessment — a continuous assessment needs to be done to see how they’re doing in general and what other interests they have that we haven’t explored yet.
In the end, our goal is to help them to be strong performers in their work. While it’s possible in some cases to push people to learn something they have little interest in and work in a position they’re not comfortable with, yet they still manage to produce very good results — some people might already have the foundation required to perform a certain job so it’s reasonable that they can do relatively well even if they don’t put that much effort, but this is not generally the case when they need to start from zero and without much interest in the said domain — people tend to work best if they’re working with the things that they’re interested in and are well-aligned to their personal goals.
In this context, reaching their full potential translates to them being a very strong contributor to the company with regards to their scope of work, while also feeling fulfilled by the work they’re doing. And to achieve that, it’s going to be easier to choose the path of least resistance — the path they need the least push to be successful on.
The tricky part about identifying someone’s potentials is that we might not be able to properly recognize and appreciate their skills and abilities in a domain that we’re not familiar with. Even in the context of a domain we know relatively well, we might still fail to recognize that someone’s potential actually surpassed what we perceived — or the opposite, lower than what we perceived — due to our inability to see things according to the bigger picture. For this reason, it’s preferable for us to have a wide range of knowledge over different domains to help us in recognizing what untapped potentials we can explore from the people we’re managing.
For example, let’s say we’re managing a fresh graduate software engineer who’s a pretty good problem solver and a strong coder. He also has a strong interest in cloud infrastructure management. It’s easy to see that he has the foundation to be a good engineer who specializes in cloud infrastructure platform engineering.
But it turns out that he’s also a big ancient history fan who’s knowledgeable on historical research methodologies and used to be an aspiring historian. Does this information add something to our perception of his potential growth?
For people unfamiliar with how historians work and how historical research is conducted — and don’t care enough to try digging deeper into it — probably no. But for those who understand that historical research requires sifting through a lot of historical documents and sources with different levels of credibility, and then try to construct a conclusion based on the evidence from the consensus of the more credible sources along with the available archaeological artifacts and the information on the geopolitical situation around the area at the time, he might be perceived as having stronger troubleshooting skills and persistence — with the additional knowledge in historical politics and diplomacy which may provide him with reasonable communication and negotiation skills.
The ability to understand that there are transferable skills from this engineer’s seemingly unrelated interest that we can leverage so he can add more value to the organization helps us to notice alternative ways to grow him and plan accordingly according to the situation.
Understanding the Psychology
When working with your team, it’s important to understand their character, state of mind, and general motivation. One of the things I recommended to Mike when I started assigning him to help me with team management was to acquire some basic knowledge on human psychology — which should be pretty helpful when we’re working with other human beings.
While some knowledge on psychology is beneficial to a manager, DO NOT TRY to diagnose and treat your direct reports as real psychologists do unless you’re properly trained to do that and you’re absolutely certain that you’re following the proper procedures. While it might be done with the best of intentions in mind, the lack of knowledge when you’re trying to “fix” someone may lead you to create an even worse problem instead of actually fixing their issues.
People have their own aspirations and interests which they want to achieve. But sometimes, in their pursuit, they’re held back by anti-patterns in their cognitive or behavioral activities. These anti-patterns are usually learned from their past experience, and undoing it isn’t always simple. This is because not every anti-pattern is learned consciously by the person themselves, sometimes they’re not even aware of it existing. Attempting to fix it might be overstepping our boundary — especially if it’s strongly tied to their personal life.
Our main concerns are going to be limited to how they’re interfacing with the organization and its common goals. It’s preferable to keep everything at the professional level. At times we might want to know more about their personal life in order to be able to help them more, and they might not mind sharing it with us to some extent. But it’s best to keep our intrusion at a minimum to respect their autonomy over their personal life.
They may have their ups and downs, which is to be expected. In the case of downs, the best way to help them might be to check with them if there’s anything we can help with and try to provide them with the assistance as requested without probing too much into it.
While we’re expecting the more mature contributors to be more stable in managing their own psychological state, life does happen and it isn’t always easy to get through. So in this regard, simply the ability to empathize with the people we’re managing and the willingness to listen when they need it should work without overstepping our boundaries in doing our job to keep them on track and help them realign their plans — which might change if there’s any major event happening in their life.
Generally, we’d like to also consider their psychological and mental state when assigning them to a certain work. Someone who’s been working as a back-end product development engineer on a payment system for a few years might be an obvious choice to be assigned to work on a critical product back-end payment component due to her experience and domain expertise. But if she is in a state where she’s already burnt out, it might be a good idea to try assigning her to work on something else — what exactly that something is depends on what projects are available in the company and what other interests and capabilities she has — which can be a change of pace for her while enabling other aspects from her self to grow.
In another case, someone who doesn’t work well with a certain person within the organization might need assistance when communicating with the person they have difficulties working with. Incompatibilities between different people may happen because of the differences they have in their perception and trains of thought. This kind of situation is not necessarily a situation where one of them is right and the other is wrong, sometimes both can be right but they’re so incompatible with one another that when one moves the other must halt — or a conflict between their approaches will cause another issue that we need to resolve, even without any ill intentions between them to sabotage each other on purpose.
Ideally, we should try to get the parties involved to understand each other’s perspectives and work together to align their points of view and general approaches. But sometimes even if they come to a mutual understanding it still doesn’t work for them to work together because each has their own personal values and motivations — which could be personal and it’s unreasonable to demand them to change to suit the job. In this situation, it might be better to find a way for them to be able to contribute to the organization and keep growing without requiring them to work too closely with each other to reduce the friction.
Generalist vs Specialist
In the context of a company, people’s job descriptions and career progression plans are often designed with specialization in mind. Because of this, those who focus their efforts more on learning a focused set of skills required to move to the next level on their career progression tend to be promoted faster than someone with equal capabilities but isn’t as focused.
When we’re talking about how people learn and grow, there’s this popular dichotomy between being a generalist and being a specialist. A generalist is perceived as someone who has a wide range of knowledge and skills while lacking in depth, while a specialist is perceived as someone who has a very narrow range of knowledge and skills but wields a considerably high level of mastery over it.
Due to how corporate jobs and career progressions are designed, there’s a tendency for some managers to be biased towards specialists than generalists when developing their team members — and this bias might tempt them to push their team members to invest more time and energy only on learning skills that are beneficial to their work performance.
Let’s say we’re all born equal and we all have 100 skill points, we can have it distributed evenly to 5 different skills, put it all on just one skill, or probably just take two skills with 70–30 ratio of the skill point distribution, under the assumption that one skill point is a standardized measurement applicable to every skill and every person. Assuming 80 is the point of mastery for a skill and 30 is the point of being just proficient enough, every person only has the capability to master one skill or being just proficient enough in three skills.
In that scenario, if a person requires to master a skill in order to progress far enough in their career, they shouldn’t distribute more than 20 skill points to the skills other than their core skill — because they need to have at least 80 skill points in their core skill. In this case, being a generalist probably wouldn’t get us far in our career progression.
But in reality, we don’t have the skill point mechanics limiting us in our personal development. Instead, we have other factors like innate abilities, personality, psychological state, and privilege to access the knowledge required for the skills which aren’t equal from person to person, so it’s not that easy to tell what is the most optimal strategy for a person to grow themselves.
Some generalists might even be able to achieve a high enough level of mastery over more than one field. In real life, we have polymaths like Leonardo Da Vinci and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who managed to achieve a high level of mastery over several different fields within their lifetime.
Given that in reality we’re not bound to a rigid skill point system and our team members might have other interests they want to pursue outside work, the best course of action is to support them in their personal pursuits. If that’s not possible, we can at least try to stay out of the way and not interfere with the process as long as it isn’t clashing with their work commitments.
Yes, they’re still spending the time that they can use to hone their skills more in the areas that directly contribute to their work and career progression. But if it’s their personal time, it’s overstepping our boundaries to stop them from doing so and ask them to only focus on work-related skills.
I think the points we should be concerned about as a manager are only these two:
- Whether they can manage to reach the level of performance expected by the company for their pay range.
- Whether their rate of growth in the relevant areas matches the rate of growth they’re expecting for their career development.
The seemingly unrelated skills they’ve learned from their personal pursuits might also turn out to be useful later, so it’s still an investment for us. At the moment, we might think that the skills they’re pursuing aren’t valuable because we lack the ability to see how it’s going to be useful — but that doesn’t make acquiring those skills and knowledge useless.
It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci’s godlike ability as a painter came from his inquisitive and explorative nature about the objects around him, which led him to study the structure of those objects and the properties of the materials constructing them to the level no artist was known to have done before. His understanding of the objects’ physical properties allowed him to depict those objects in a lifelike manner in his paintings.
While having interests outside work is good and can help people’s growth in many other aspects, there might be situations where we’re dealing with someone who suddenly shows zero interest in their work and spending their time almost exclusively on exploring other areas — which is especially a problem if it stops them from performing well at work. In this case, it might be best to check with them and try to find out what made them lost interest at work and how they see the situation. Sudden change in behavior might indicate something is happening with them, and having more information from them could help us identify the issue.
Ensuring Career Growth and Progression
When managing and growing people, ultimately we’re aiming for them to be able to reach a higher level in terms of their abilities within the context of job performance and career progression. Assuming that the company already has an established grading standard for the career progression of the employees, we should be able to use the grading standard as a basis for planning their career development.
For engineering and technical people in general, usually, there are two general paths they can take for career development once they’re in a senior enough position: the individual contributor path and the managerial path. Different companies may have different expectations on each path and each grade within the path.
To be fair, as each company usually has an established procedure to review employee performances and promote employees, I don’t think I have that much to say for this section. The general rule is to just follow the company’s policies.
We can follow the procedures and take the employee career development handbook — which I expect to include the grading standards and the expectations for each level of career progression — and work with the people we’re managing to develop themselves according to the career progression standards established in the company. Just make sure to check with the employee whether the career development plan is well-aligned with their aspirations and see where they can fit according to their interests and personality — and then start to work with them to improve their performance and scope of work to move towards the level expected for them to go to the next level.
The tricky part of career development is that the higher we’re going, the scarcer the opportunity to be promoted becomes and the bar that we need to pass for promotion gets significantly higher compared to the previous promotion requirements. Assigning people to a high-level position in a company usually requires a very strong justification regarding why they must be assigned to that post and whether they can bring significantly more value to the company if compared to the people in the lower-level positions with similar scope of work.
The requirements for the higher-level positions might be less standardized than the lower-level ones because it depends more on the strategic advantages they can bring to the table instead of simply a list of skills they have, and ideally, the people who are assigned to these high-level positions are the people who managed to develop every bit of their potential to a high enough level for them to be valuable to the company in multiple dimensions — also mature and resilient enough to handle the level of expectations and pressure for those positions.
Conclusion
In general, growing people is somewhat tricky because it highly depends on the person themselves. As the manager, what we can do is limited to understanding the potentials and aspirations of the people we’re trying to grow and guiding them to reach their career goals.
From things that have been explained in the previous sections, I can conclude it with a few takeaways:
- Understand our team members’ potentials and interests, see if they have knowledge and skills they learned from exploring other things that can be leveraged to improve their work performance.
- Know their psychological states and be aware if they’re in distress or having burnout.
- Let them pursue their aspirations outside work even if we might not see much value in it right now, just keep watching and see if there’s anything that we can use to help them improve further both in their career and as a person.
- Align their career development plans with the company’s career progression guidelines, if they’re aiming for a promotion try to help them fulfill the requirements by growing them to the level where they can consistently give the level of performance expected on the grade they’re aiming for.
Someone who has more experience being a manager might not be necessarily better at managing and growing their team members than someone who has just got promoted into a managerial role — for example, despite having been holding the position for a considerably longer period of time, I personally don’t think I have a very high affinity for the job if compared to Mike. A manager’s performance depends on the chemistry between the manager and the people they’re managing as well, since it requires cooperation from both the manager and the people they’re supporting.
Being a manager also involves working on things that are not within the scope of growing our team members, which leads to different managers having different priorities at work also. Just as different team members have their own personalities and preferences, the managers also vary in their approaches to manage their teams.
Some managers might focus more on driving project executions and meeting business goals — and is very good at that, which makes them extremely valuable for the organization — but has a relatively limited range in the variety of people whose growth they can support well. Some other managers might focus more on developing a strong and cohesive team by focusing more on developing their people’s professional conduct, attitude, and decision-making skills so the team can be the driver for the projects themselves while the manager focuses on a more strategic side of things.
Because the managers themselves have different priorities and circumstances, with their own characters and future growth potentials — since the managers also don’t stop growing once they become a manager — the managers and their direct reports need to be able to communicate effectively and to be open with each other — while respecting each other’s boundaries — in order to work and grow together.
In many cases, the people we manage also contribute to our growth as their manager, which makes it a two-way relation. Therefore, listening to their feedback and trying to learn from their perspectives and experience can be extremely beneficial for our growth as well.
