New engineering managers go through these 4 stages of awakening

It’s all about changing your perspective

Many of our users at Okay are recently minted engineering managers: they have shown early signs of being able to lead others through a combination of emotional and technical skills. Quite often, this is just the beginning of their journey on the path to becoming a great leader. This short post gives a glimpse into what lies ahead if you find yourself in this situation!

The 4 stages

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it
- Albert Einstein

Effectively working through others is the core skill a first level manager has to learn. Navigating the transition successfully requires changing your perspective on yourself, your work and others. For each phase of the transition, I also included a list of skills and traits to develop if you want to dig more.

• The first building block of this skill is the ability to manage oneself. Ask yourself: how do I spend my time everyday? What do I think about my own performance in the past few months? What do I need to learn to get better? How am I perceived by others? Answering these questions precisely and honestly will help you build a “ behavioral model” of yourself, which makes it easier to separate your past individual contributor persona from your new manager role in your mind. It will also help you reinforce underlying skills/traits such as the ability to learn, humility, and tactical skills like planning and time management.
• The second building block is to say goodbye to the individual contributor in you. This is where many new managers stumble. Yes, you can probably do the job better or faster than several of your directs, but this is their job now, not yours. The key mindset here is to use your “model of the individual contributor” as a starting point, see how it applies to a specific person or situation — and sometimes it won’t really apply because your directs are different from you — and see how you can influence the final outcome by carefully using this model. The related skills to develop here are delegation, teaching and growing others, and keeping people accountable.

“Earthrise” — the first picture of our planet from the moon and one of the most influential photos of all time. The simple but radical change in perspective it created gave rise to the environmental movement.

• The third building block is to constantly and relentlessly update your models of yourself and your directs. By now, you may have seen situations where your directs surprised you, positively or negatively. You “thought” you were doing the right thing and realized you made a mistake, or you “thought” you were helping somebody when in fact you were micro-managing and slowing them down. The main tool to master here is giving and receiving feedback, along with its more evolved forms such as coaching. Feedback is not a sugarcoated way to blame or praise other individuals, but a rational approach to dealing with interpersonal differences and learning from them; there is a lot of literature on this topic, and to simplify its purpose in this context: it allows you to communicate your “model” to others, and also understand the model of others, ie how they work, feel or react in different situations.
• The final building block for working through others is to create a model for the team itself. If you have successfully acquired the first three blocks, you can know connect all these “models” together and build “a team”, which is essentially that one thing managers are supposed to build in place of writing code. It requires an additional level of awareness from you, where you need to detect how people complement each other, source and hire for missing skills, or remove under-performers. You may also need to solidify the best practices of the team, as well as formalize its cores values and long-term goals. A good test here is to go on vacation for more than one week with no internet connection (take a phone, just in case), and then measure whether the team stayed on track in your absence. The critical skills here are obviously team building, performance management, hiring, strategy, communicating vision and goals

Where to go from here ?

By the time you have mastered the 4 stages, you will likely feel the need to quantify your progress — make the model come alive with data! We recommend books like Accelerate to explore what metrics are useful to gather and monitor. We also recommend running regular surveys with your teams to understand their engagement levels and their own unique perspectives. Finally, you can ping us here at Okay and we’ll be happy to share our expertise.