14 ms·

Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

244 points by womitt 6y ago

bovermyer 6y ago
I highly recommend "The First-Time Manager" by Belker et al if you're interested in this.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I also highly recommend "Managing Humans" to all engineering leaders. No affiliation (other than happy reader). https://randsinrepose.com/books/ https://randsinrepose.com/books/
- gstipi 6y ago
  Another great one is "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/97814...
beckingz 6y ago
Obligatory plug for the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. https://softskills.audio/ https://softskills.audio/
- ellisv 6y ago
  Soft Skills is my new favorite podcast. I've been going through all the old episodes.
- interlocutor2 6y ago
  These guys are funny and insightful. When I wrote in they actually answered my question.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding. Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management. Before the people manager crowd chimes in with "it's not my job", "we have leads", etc, I want to say that it's about the principle of the matter. I don't care if it's "not your job", on principle you should want to keep your skills sharp in order to fully relate to your supports and, if shit is on fire and you're the only one around, to actually do something and fix the problem instead of completely leaning on your team.
- watwut 6y ago
  I dont need managers to be coding. I do need them to have technical background and willingness to understand what tech is relevant to them - I had only bad experiences with non-technical managers. But I really dont understand why they should be coding. Even active developers are not able to fix whatever in any module, you fix only in areas you understand. When shit is on fire, I dont want managers or other random developers to create a bunch on hotfixes that will cause new problems. I want managers to organize the project in a way that shit wont burn on every release.
  - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
    They should be coding because they're "engineering" managers. What's the point of having engineering in your title if you're not actually practicing the craft? They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way. They'll be able to mentor and provide guidance on technology best practices and patterns. They should be coding because they'll be able to more accurately plan and execute projects. Understanding and applying the technology is understanding it's pitfalls and anticipating potential upcoming challenges.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      >They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way. That's a valid point although I've seen it go badly when a mostly out of touch manager (time is finite, even the most technical manager will be out of touch) thinks they're still at the top of their technical game. They then force out of date engineering decisions on the team. >They'll be able to mentor and provide guidance on technology best practices and patterns. That should be done by the senior engineers and tech leads with support from the manager. These are the people who spend 100% of their time thinking technology while even a technical manager will do it 25% of the time. The manager should be the one to structure these conversations, formalize mentorship processes and so on.
      - 6y ago
austincheney 6y ago
> Most interactions are ego-based because people aren’t as self-aware as they could be. Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children have. For example play a board game or card game with children and realize they never know when it’s their turn to play despite watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the rules. They are not self aware. That portion of the brain has not developed yet. It is frustrating to encounter adults lacking of self awareness where a commonly expected skill of fully functional adulthood is absent. In some cases that can be due to wide spectrum disorders like autism but is more generally due to immaturity, the absence of expected normal development. Another queue into this is a false expectation of soft skills. That doesn’t mean being soft or kind. Soft skills are perceptual skills associated is active listening and empathy, which sometimes requires being a mean asshole. People with a lack of self awareness tend to have a lot of challenge in this area. They are not the center of the universe, sometimes fail horribly and embarrassingly, and demand harsh unpleasant words. For people lacking of self awareness the harsh reality of corrective communication is likely poorly accepted as they either continue to fail or suffer emotional trauma.
- faeriechangling 6y ago
  Well this was a very pleasant post to read as an autistic person. I can appearantly just have a lack of self awareness completely out of my control and this is embarassing, and demands harsh unpleasant words, even though this approach is likely to fail and inflict emotional trauma on me. "Empathy" after a social faux pas to me is kind of like a blameless post mortem. Blunt yet unjudgemental with a call to action and some discussion of what went right. Perhaps your words are so likely to fail because because you're taking the wrong approach?
  - loopz 6y ago
    This is more directed to those who tend to lead in every social situation. You might be perceived more favourably than you feel yourself. Try asking people for feedback on your approach. The environment is infinitely more powerful in most normal cases.
  - 6y ago
known 6y ago
Protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)
zerop 6y ago
I liked managersclub as well. Interviews with real managers from diverse set of companies... One thing I like most about them is that they ask same questions to all managers.
zeckalpha 6y ago
Please don’t call them soft skills. If they weren’t hard, there’d be better leadership out there.
- kaoD 6y ago
  This might be just a problem on English where hard is a homonym ("rigid" vs "effortful"). Notice their antonyms differ: "soft" vs "easy".
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  Soft skills != easy skills.
- username90 6y ago
  Soft skills means they are hard to measure. That is the original definition. Hard skills are easy to test, you either solved the problem or you didn't. With soft skills you don't really know, you need to measure it subjectively.
  - zeckalpha 6y ago
    Some of the things mentioned in the article are easy to measure.
- alchemism 6y ago
  The phrase is also used in science — “soft science” as a category differentiates psychology and anthropology from chemistry and physics.
miccah 6y ago
Good leaders are people who teach others to grow, progress, and ultimately become their own leaders. Most managers aren't incentivized to grow their engineers because it would mean losing them. I find it hard to fully trust my manager because I know my best interests are only partially in their mind. They also need to care about the business and their own position, which usually carries more weight than how I want to grow my career.
asimpletune 6y ago
I think there’s a lot of great advice in here, and a useful exercise is to find equivalences - or equal but alternate ways to rephrase timeless advice x. One such equivalence that I found to the above is to focus on regarding others honestly. Often times there are barriers to seeing people for who they are, so if you can focus on identifying those barriers and confronting them with yourself, you then have a shot at regarding others truthfully. The theory goes that if you can do that, you don’t need to have so much managerial social engineering polish. You can just be polite and honest and everything will pretty much work. I have to say from personal experience that this has worked well with me. In the situations that it hasn’t it’s been due to others being caught in their own inability to regard me honestly. In such a case, I don’t think the smooth operating manager would fare any better or worse. So basically you can’t win at everything, but you can worry about yourself!
- afarrell 6y ago
  > regarding others honestly Strong agree. Example: One of your reports says something that you perceive as self-deprecating. It can be tempting to dismiss this as mere impostor syndrome. Doing so might soothe your fear that someone you manage lacks confidence but it does not serve them well as a leader. I advocate instead approaching with a spirit of curiosity: What about their experience drives them to that imperfect expression of their professional needs? Applying a technique named "Clean Questions" can help increase clarity about that, if you're looking for something to google.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I discussed some related soft skill tactics in this post - for the specific problem of managing technical respect for a specialist team (in this case a machine learning team). - https://managingml.substack.com/p/the-myth-that-machine-learning-engineers https://managingml.substack.com/p/the-myth-that-machine-lear...
staysaasy 6y ago
A lot of this post is (good!) tactical advice. I strongly agree with the comment on emotional self-control. IMO this is one of the top ways that managers fail or struggle, especially as their teams grow or if times are hard. I've thought about this a lot and wrote some more strategic thoughts on this topic of management soft skills here. It's written more from the perspective of hiring managers, but hopefully some of the content transfers: https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-managers.html https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-man...
TheBlerch 6y ago
Ron Lichty https://ronlichty.com/ https://ronlichty.com/ is a highly experienced engineering manager based in SF and Seattle who writes, speaks and trains internationally, as well as occasionally jumping into teams as interim VP Engineering. I've had the pleasure of hearing several of his talks in-person and he's constantly emphasizing the importance of soft skills. He wrote a very helpful book on the subject, Managing the Unmanageable, published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/ https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/.
alexpotato 6y ago
Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate leadership: Everyone asks three questions of people leading them: 1. Can I trust you? 2. Do you care about me? 3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high standards). Think about someone you admire. Odds are the answer to the above for them is "yes" to all three. Now think of someone you have had a lot of problems with. Odds are the answers to the above are "no". [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz
- wsinks 6y ago
  I love this! And had no idea about it. Really really stellar way of looking at it. And for a leader, you can scale these by caring about roles and what info those roles get to show trust. Really cool framework as a fundamental baseline.
- username90 6y ago
  Here is a fourth: 4. Do you delegate high visibility tasks? Managers who don't do this work hard to hog all the glory, spend all their time in meetings with other managers or presenting to higher level people etc. It isn't good for them nor their reports, by not growing the reports skills they have a hard time getting to the next level as a manager. Also they create a situation where they are the bus factor 1, which is problematic in itself.
  - jdgiese 6y ago
    4 seems like it is a particular instance of 2
    - rmwaite 6y ago
      I’d say in many cases it could also be 1.
      - DarkByte 6y ago
        I agree. I consider delegation of high value or visibility tasks as a combination of 1 and 2. Regardless I recognize it as being very important overall.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Hard skills in eng management are underrated. If you do not have hard skills, you cannot recognize talent among your developer team. Likewise, your developers will feel they cannot learn much from you and have a meh attitude towards your advice.
superzadeh 6y ago
Shameless plug for the Bunch app, this has been the most useful for me so far on soft skills. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-daily-leadership-coach/id1500872908 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-daily-leadership-coach/i...
jarjoura 6y ago
The article mentions self-awareness as the number 1, but I disagree. | Creator mindset | Having a creator mindset over a victim mindset is great for leadership. The victim treats situations as if they can’t change them, while the creator takes responsibility and actively shapes reality. Creators turn every situation into an opportunity. I've actually seen this more broadly labeled as someone having a Growth Mindset instead of a Fixed Mindset, and I 100% agree. This should probably be the #1 value that makes someone a great leader. In fact, I believe it's so important, that it should be the basis for all other qualities and skills a leader develops on their journey. It's actually a rare trait amongst software engineers and I think this is the trait that either propels someone into a great leader, or holds them back when they are forced into it. My #2 on the list is perseverance and that goes hand-in-hand with having a growth mindset. The best way to test this quality on anyone is if you can successfully answer yes to the question, "is this person reliable?" If you have a growth mindset and perseverance, then I believe you can pick up the other traits and learn on your way up the ladder.
andrei_says_ 6y ago
From Google’s epic study on successful teams: But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’ And the long form nyt article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

244 points by womitt 6y ago

bovermyer 6y ago

I highly recommend "The First-Time Manager" by Belker et al if you're interested in this.

sokoloff 6y ago
I also highly recommend "Managing Humans" to all engineering leaders. No affiliation (other than happy reader). https://randsinrepose.com/books/ https://randsinrepose.com/books/
gstipi 6y ago
Another great one is "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/97814...

beckingz 6y ago

Obligatory plug for the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. https://softskills.audio/ https://softskills.audio/

ellisv 6y ago
Soft Skills is my new favorite podcast. I've been going through all the old episodes.
interlocutor2 6y ago
These guys are funny and insightful. When I wrote in they actually answered my question.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding. Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management. Before the people manager crowd chimes in with "it's not my job", "we have leads", etc, I want to say that it's about the principle of the matter. I don't care if it's "not your job", on principle you should want to keep your skills sharp in order to fully relate to your supports and, if shit is on fire and you're the only one around, to actually do something and fix the problem instead of completely leaning on your team.

watwut 6y ago
I dont need managers to be coding. I do need them to have technical background and willingness to understand what tech is relevant to them - I had only bad experiences with non-technical managers. But I really dont understand why they should be coding. Even active developers are not able to fix whatever in any module, you fix only in areas you understand. When shit is on fire, I dont want managers or other random developers to create a bunch on hotfixes that will cause new problems. I want managers to organize the project in a way that shit wont burn on every release.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  They should be coding because they're "engineering" managers. What's the point of having engineering in your title if you're not actually practicing the craft? They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way. They'll be able to mentor and provide guidance on technology best practices and patterns. They should be coding because they'll be able to more accurately plan and execute projects. Understanding and applying the technology is understanding it's pitfalls and anticipating potential upcoming challenges.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way. That's a valid point although I've seen it go badly when a mostly out of touch manager (time is finite, even the most technical manager will be out of touch) thinks they're still at the top of their technical game. They then force out of date engineering decisions on the team. >They'll be able to mentor and provide guidance on technology best practices and patterns. That should be done by the senior engineers and tech leads with support from the manager. These are the people who spend 100% of their time thinking technology while even a technical manager will do it 25% of the time. The manager should be the one to structure these conversations, formalize mentorship processes and so on.
    - 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago

> Most interactions are ego-based because people aren’t as self-aware as they could be. Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children have. For example play a board game or card game with children and realize they never know when it’s their turn to play despite watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the rules. They are not self aware. That portion of the brain has not developed yet. It is frustrating to encounter adults lacking of self awareness where a commonly expected skill of fully functional adulthood is absent. In some cases that can be due to wide spectrum disorders like autism but is more generally due to immaturity, the absence of expected normal development. Another queue into this is a false expectation of soft skills. That doesn’t mean being soft or kind. Soft skills are perceptual skills associated is active listening and empathy, which sometimes requires being a mean asshole. People with a lack of self awareness tend to have a lot of challenge in this area. They are not the center of the universe, sometimes fail horribly and embarrassingly, and demand harsh unpleasant words. For people lacking of self awareness the harsh reality of corrective communication is likely poorly accepted as they either continue to fail or suffer emotional trauma.

faeriechangling 6y ago
Well this was a very pleasant post to read as an autistic person. I can appearantly just have a lack of self awareness completely out of my control and this is embarassing, and demands harsh unpleasant words, even though this approach is likely to fail and inflict emotional trauma on me. "Empathy" after a social faux pas to me is kind of like a blameless post mortem. Blunt yet unjudgemental with a call to action and some discussion of what went right. Perhaps your words are so likely to fail because because you're taking the wrong approach?
- loopz 6y ago
  This is more directed to those who tend to lead in every social situation. You might be perceived more favourably than you feel yourself. Try asking people for feedback on your approach. The environment is infinitely more powerful in most normal cases.
- 6y ago

known 6y ago

Protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)

zerop 6y ago

I liked managersclub as well. Interviews with real managers from diverse set of companies... One thing I like most about them is that they ask same questions to all managers.

zeckalpha 6y ago

Please don’t call them soft skills. If they weren’t hard, there’d be better leadership out there.

kaoD 6y ago
This might be just a problem on English where hard is a homonym ("rigid" vs "effortful"). Notice their antonyms differ: "soft" vs "easy".
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Soft skills != easy skills.
username90 6y ago
Soft skills means they are hard to measure. That is the original definition. Hard skills are easy to test, you either solved the problem or you didn't. With soft skills you don't really know, you need to measure it subjectively.
- zeckalpha 6y ago
  Some of the things mentioned in the article are easy to measure.
alchemism 6y ago
The phrase is also used in science — “soft science” as a category differentiates psychology and anthropology from chemistry and physics.

miccah 6y ago

Good leaders are people who teach others to grow, progress, and ultimately become their own leaders. Most managers aren't incentivized to grow their engineers because it would mean losing them. I find it hard to fully trust my manager because I know my best interests are only partially in their mind. They also need to care about the business and their own position, which usually carries more weight than how I want to grow my career.

asimpletune 6y ago

I think there’s a lot of great advice in here, and a useful exercise is to find equivalences - or equal but alternate ways to rephrase timeless advice x. One such equivalence that I found to the above is to focus on regarding others honestly. Often times there are barriers to seeing people for who they are, so if you can focus on identifying those barriers and confronting them with yourself, you then have a shot at regarding others truthfully. The theory goes that if you can do that, you don’t need to have so much managerial social engineering polish. You can just be polite and honest and everything will pretty much work. I have to say from personal experience that this has worked well with me. In the situations that it hasn’t it’s been due to others being caught in their own inability to regard me honestly. In such a case, I don’t think the smooth operating manager would fare any better or worse. So basically you can’t win at everything, but you can worry about yourself!

afarrell 6y ago
> regarding others honestly Strong agree. Example: One of your reports says something that you perceive as self-deprecating. It can be tempting to dismiss this as mere impostor syndrome. Doing so might soothe your fear that someone you manage lacks confidence but it does not serve them well as a leader. I advocate instead approaching with a spirit of curiosity: What about their experience drives them to that imperfect expression of their professional needs? Applying a technique named "Clean Questions" can help increase clarity about that, if you're looking for something to google.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I discussed some related soft skill tactics in this post - for the specific problem of managing technical respect for a specialist team (in this case a machine learning team). - https://managingml.substack.com/p/the-myth-that-machine-learning-engineers https://managingml.substack.com/p/the-myth-that-machine-lear...

staysaasy 6y ago

A lot of this post is (good!) tactical advice. I strongly agree with the comment on emotional self-control. IMO this is one of the top ways that managers fail or struggle, especially as their teams grow or if times are hard. I've thought about this a lot and wrote some more strategic thoughts on this topic of management soft skills here. It's written more from the perspective of hiring managers, but hopefully some of the content transfers: https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-managers.html https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-man...

TheBlerch 6y ago

Ron Lichty https://ronlichty.com/ https://ronlichty.com/ is a highly experienced engineering manager based in SF and Seattle who writes, speaks and trains internationally, as well as occasionally jumping into teams as interim VP Engineering. I've had the pleasure of hearing several of his talks in-person and he's constantly emphasizing the importance of soft skills. He wrote a very helpful book on the subject, Managing the Unmanageable, published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/ https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/.

alexpotato 6y ago

Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate leadership: Everyone asks three questions of people leading them: 1. Can I trust you? 2. Do you care about me? 3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high standards). Think about someone you admire. Odds are the answer to the above for them is "yes" to all three. Now think of someone you have had a lot of problems with. Odds are the answers to the above are "no". [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz

wsinks 6y ago
I love this! And had no idea about it. Really really stellar way of looking at it. And for a leader, you can scale these by caring about roles and what info those roles get to show trust. Really cool framework as a fundamental baseline.
username90 6y ago
Here is a fourth: 4. Do you delegate high visibility tasks? Managers who don't do this work hard to hog all the glory, spend all their time in meetings with other managers or presenting to higher level people etc. It isn't good for them nor their reports, by not growing the reports skills they have a hard time getting to the next level as a manager. Also they create a situation where they are the bus factor 1, which is problematic in itself.
- jdgiese 6y ago
  4 seems like it is a particular instance of 2
  - rmwaite 6y ago
    I’d say in many cases it could also be 1.
    - DarkByte 6y ago
      I agree. I consider delegation of high value or visibility tasks as a combination of 1 and 2. Regardless I recognize it as being very important overall.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Hard skills in eng management are underrated. If you do not have hard skills, you cannot recognize talent among your developer team. Likewise, your developers will feel they cannot learn much from you and have a meh attitude towards your advice.

superzadeh 6y ago

Shameless plug for the Bunch app, this has been the most useful for me so far on soft skills. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-daily-leadership-coach/id1500872908 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-daily-leadership-coach/i...

jarjoura 6y ago

The article mentions self-awareness as the number 1, but I disagree. | Creator mindset | Having a creator mindset over a victim mindset is great for leadership. The victim treats situations as if they can’t change them, while the creator takes responsibility and actively shapes reality. Creators turn every situation into an opportunity. I've actually seen this more broadly labeled as someone having a Growth Mindset instead of a Fixed Mindset, and I 100% agree. This should probably be the #1 value that makes someone a great leader. In fact, I believe it's so important, that it should be the basis for all other qualities and skills a leader develops on their journey. It's actually a rare trait amongst software engineers and I think this is the trait that either propels someone into a great leader, or holds them back when they are forced into it. My #2 on the list is perseverance and that goes hand-in-hand with having a growth mindset. The best way to test this quality on anyone is if you can successfully answer yes to the question, "is this person reliable?" If you have a growth mindset and perseverance, then I believe you can pick up the other traits and learn on your way up the ladder.

andrei_says_ 6y ago

From Google’s epic study on successful teams: But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’ And the long form nyt article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...