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Engineering Manager: Beyond Leadership

This is a follow-up article in the Engineering Manager series, My First Thoughts as an Engineering Manager and Engineering Manager: Do Not Be a Hero. Nowadays, I see more and more the words "leader" and "leadership". Often, I ask myself what these words mean for the people and the companies:

  • What is a leader?
  • How many kinds of leaders are?
  • What are the companies looking for?
  • Do we need so many leaders?
  • Can we hire leaders?

In this article, I am not going to talk about a leader in deep because I feel there are many articles about it, but how this role is overrated and why an Engineering Manager is not the synonym of a "leader". 

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Engineering Manager: Do Not Be a Hero

This is article is a follow-up to My First Thoughts as an Engineering Manager. It is a description of some behaviors that as engineering managers we have to avoid because they have a negative impact on the teams.

I've read many books and articles about software engineering team dynamics, the term "Hero" usually references a software engineer that tries to help everyone and solve all the problems not using the best practices and focusing on the short term. Of course, I've seen this behavior in some engineers but usually, it hasn´t a big impact unless there is a "hero" culture in the organization.

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One-on-One Meetings in Agile

All managers struggle with the fine balance between doing work that achieves short term goals vs investing time in activities with long term benefits. Output that's immediately visible may give a feeling of satisfaction in the moment, but it soon fades away and demands more energy to keep up with the pace of growth and scale of the company. Focussing too much on progress in the short term eventually slows down every manager in the long run.

Energy spent in growing business may help you achieve some outcomes, but the same energy invested in growing people can produce remarkable results.