Moving into engineering management? Five things to know first
Google ‘becoming a manager’ and you’ll find 951 million* articles telling you exactly how to make that milestone career move — often in five, ten or 25 well-intentioned bullet points.
Despite its title, this post isn’t one of them. At least, not in the sense that I want to tell you how best to do your new job in five easy steps.
For most of us, management is rather like life. You aren’t handed the rule book on day one and told what good looks like. Maybe you won’t even be told what it is you’re meant to be doing.
For me, management is about empathy, intuition and interpersonal skills, not the academic frameworks that are more about processes than people.
What follows is what I’ve learned through trial and error. It’s what works for me. It won’t be right for every organisation and your own mileage may vary.
But if you’re suffering from imposter syndrome, or you’re looking forward to telling your reports what to do differently, maybe you should read on. Certainly, don’t be in a hurry to change your style — the person who hired you might have seen you exhibit skills you didn’t know you had.
*Correct at the time of writing
1. You need to stop coding. Seriously
I taught myself to write software and have always loved coding. When the chance arose to make my living as a developer, I jumped at it. Things went well. At one company where I joined as a Senior Developer, within three months I was informed I was now Development Manager. Over time I became the de facto Global Head of IT.
This isn’t meant to sound impressive and it may not even be particularly unusual. The point is, my skills up to that point had been in logistics, customer service, telesales and software development. Now I had to teach myself people management. While doing it.
Starting out as a team leader can be an uncomfortable place, particularly in our industry. As a developer you come in, solve problems and produce code. That makes it easy to measure your own performance, much as a bricklayer might. But management is a long game calling for many small changes, reviewed often.
I was asked to design and build a new software platform and given absolute autonomy to build my team and get it done. But what was I actually doing every day? Not much, it seemed to me. Just a lot of meetings and talking, which I like to do anyway.
I had a classic case of imposter syndrome. So as deadlines loomed I dived in to help the team by taking on some of the coding myself. Sensible adjustment of priorities in an emergency, I thought. It felt like the right thing to do.
Fortunately it was a good team and they soon called me out. I was no longer supporting them, and had in fact become part of the problem. Their feedback summed it up: “When you weren’t coding, you helped us work together better. We knew what we were doing and why.”
2. It’s not about you
It’s hardly news that managers are there to manage people, or that teams can still function without a manager whereas the reverse is rarely true.
The secret sauce you bring to the table is probably already quite well developed but it might be invisible to you. Your success in any project comes from how well you can align your team with their common objectives.
I think this may be even more of an issue in the world of software engineering, where the absolute focus of coding is a world away from the so-called “soft skills” and strategic perspective a manager needs.
There’s sometimes a tendency for teams to look like a carbon copy of the person who hired them. What helped me at the outset was to hire a team as diverse as a group of five people could be. Quite apart from the wider range of supplementary skills they brought, I found helping them work together both intuitive and instructive.
We faced a lot of challenges and, looking back, I got a lot wrong because I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing. But it was a great team and I was intent on making sure the people working for me had a good experience — learning, growing, developing and having meaningful work to do. And it just worked.
The team’s feedback was now: “Look what you can do when you’re not writing code”. Everyone was happier, more productive and aligned, and I thought: I can do so much more in this space.
A lot of managers come to their position because it’s the only way to get a pay rise. Maybe they’re a subject matter expert, or just think they should be in charge, or perhaps they just don’t like being told what to do. I once had a manager tell me (with a straight face) that they were anti-authority.
But some of the best managers I’ve ever worked with took the role because they wanted other people to succeed. And people really do respond to that.
3. Read management books (but not too many)
I’ve never actually met a people manager who relies 100% on academic management frameworks ‘in the wild’. Instead we rely on our ability to forge relationships and get the best out of others.
I certainly don’t recommend you read books that claim to offer you the ‘rules of management’, or a ‘Management 101’ course.
The people-first approach I describe above is one I developed because it felt right, long before I’d heard of concepts such as “servant leadership” or “influence, not compliance”.
My senior manager at the time referred to my style as “new-fangled hippy management”. That led me to question whether I was being naïve. Perhaps I could be more structured or compliance-oriented and do an even better job?
As a result, I went into a number of roles where I struggled to gain traction with teams. We got things done but it wasn’t the same. By the time I got to my current role with MPB, my philosophy was more or less back where I started, only now backed by experience. It’s great to work for an organisation that puts its people first.
Having said all that, there are a handful of key books I’d always recommend to people transitioning into management which I’ve listed further down.
Nowadays I find myself reading far more about influence and motivation — how to bring people along on this journey without actually having to tell them what to do.
4. Talk less. Listen more
I might have mentioned that I like to talk, but listening is a skill every manager should work on. It’s harder than it might seem to hear what people are saying and not what you think they’re saying. Instead of jumping in to contribute, make like Stephen Covey: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
As Shelle Rose Charvet advises, I always try to “go to the other person’s bus stop”. In other words, I’m going to come to you and understand where you’re coming from before I try to convince you to come on board, and together we’ll work towards the same place — even if it turns out not to be where I thought it was.
Because what’s the alternative? If I come from a position that I’m 100% going to get you to do what I want, that feels manipulative and won’t necessarily lead to the best outcome.
5. Look after yourself
I left my first management job because eventually I found myself routinely working 80-hour weeks. I hadn’t had a pay rise since I joined. I was always-on and might be called at 11pm on a Saturday because someone in Sydney needed a password reset.
It was a springboard for me, a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow, but it also finally taught me to value myself. I had form, you see. In another job I had once clocked a 108-hour week, including 36 hours back to back. It’s natural to want to impress, but this happened because I was expected to fill in for absent colleagues.
Eventually the regular long hours became unsustainable. I was ambitious, I wanted to go further, but I also needed to start protecting myself.
It’s one thing to decide to work extra time to ensure a project is delivered on time at the required quality. It’s something else to find your willingness to step in being taken as read.
And sometimes putting people first does mean going the extra distance. One of the most impressive senior managers I ever worked for went out of his way to ensure a new hire had somewhere to live. It wasn’t his job to do that and nobody asked him to. His other work certainly didn’t go away. But he put in extra time and effort because he considered it was the right thing to do for the person and for the team.
In one role I had a challenging project to deliver and worked all hours to deliver it. I chose to do that because I wanted to do the job well (and was being well compensated). But if that’s your long-term strategy, or you’ve no option but to work that way, you risk burning out sooner or later. Supporting your people has to mean supporting yourself too.
TL;DR
I know there are schools of thought that management must be highly disciplined and use the latest frameworks with smart KPIs and metrics, but I have always tried to put people first.
I consider myself a caretaker for a part of the organisation and I cannot succeed unless the individuals I work with also succeed.
If you’re looking at your first management role, above all learn what your own key value is to the organisation and don’t spend another moment worrying that you’re unqualified to lead. And if you can’t stop worrying — talk about it!
Reading list
If you’re going to read anything about management, here are the books I recommend.
- Drive by Dan Pink (Canongate)
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott (Macmillan)
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey (Simon & Schuster)
- Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (Bloomsbury)
- Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf (Paulist Press)
- Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (Random House)
Rob MacGregor is an Engineering Manager at MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video gear. www.mpb.com
