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I made the transition about 4 years ago. In trying to help my senior engineers level up to leadership positions, I've learned the following: 1. Leadership = Ow
by hliyan 9y ago
I made the transition about 4 years ago. In trying to help my senior engineers level up to leadership positions, I've learned the following:
1. Leadership = Ownership
2. Organizational priorities > engineering purity
3. Tact > undiluted truth
In order to be able to lead more than one person, you need to be able to first lead one person: yourself. Ownership means taking a responsibility assigned to you, understanding why it's important to the organization objectives (rather than blinding executing), driving it to completion and reporting progress without your manager ever having to poll or prod you.
As engineers, our first instinct is to engineer things the best possible way with the best possible technologies. As managers, we'll need to understand that in a non-ideal world, there are tradeoffs. Sometimes you need to be able to prioritize organizational goals ahead of your engineering preferences. E.g. sometimes you'll need to maintain a legacy codebase a little longer even though you know you want to rewrite using the latest tech; sometimes you'll have to prioritize new features over tech debt etc.
As right-brained/logical individuals, we tend to hold objective reality over all else and tend to communicate it in concentrated form. We may want to be efficient in communications, but sometimes in doing so, we end up making the team inefficient by unnecessarily generating negative emotions within the team members. Communication is a local maximum. The global maximum is the team. In other words, sometimes you must suffer fools gladly, you'll need to learn to tell people no without hurting their egos.
If you exhibit these qualities as an engineer, any good manager will mark you as a lead candidate.
- hrpnk 9y agoI agree on the ownership and proactivity being key here. Look for possibilities to show and practice leadership skills within the current company setup and role. This can be as simple as taking one story end-to-end to production from requirement analysis to deployment and experiment analysis while interacting with different roles (product, engineering, devops) and even explicitly asking your manager(s) for such possibilities. Being the person that knows the progress and owning success is key here, plus you will score some points for being someone that work can be delegated to. Organising learning groups, guilds is also of help to get visibility within an organisation while still being fairly close to tech as you form a group of people around a topic you're passionate about. Another important aspect is cross-team collaboration. For example, bringing key people together to solve a problem for the organisation (i.e. spending too much time on deployments, production incidents, repeating the same problems). Calling such situations out and suggesting ways to solve it or collaborating on a solution is another great way to try out leadership skills.
- mseebach 9y ago> 3. Tact > undiluted truth This is correct, but it's important that you never dilute the truth so much that you end up not delivering the whole truth. Obviously, you should avoid ever being in such a situation, but if circumstances are such that you have to choose between delivering the whole truth or tact, choose the truth and clean up afterwards. Hurt pride can be mended, broken trust and untruths left to fester generally can't.