As Fearless’ Engineering Passion Coach, Jon King strives to lead and support our herd of engineers. In his 7+ years at Fearless, Jon has held numerous roles but he said the transition from an engineer working on code on a daily basis to a manager aspiring to be a good leader took some work.
Every person, and more specifically every engineer, is different but Jon shares the pain points facing engineers who want to move into manager/leadership roles and how to bridge the gap and improve your skillset.
5 reasons why it is hard for many engineers to become managers:
1. Repetition is important for managers but often unnatural for engineers
Repetition has been programmed out of programmers. The things engineers do on a day-to-day basis whether it’s the basic tenant of not copying or using automation relies on the concept of not doing things over and over.
When you are a leader the primary goal is to inspire change in a person or org, or team. That is a complex communication tool and very often you have to repeat yourself and say the same thing again and again for full comprehension. Just because you say something doesn’t mean someone heard it, let alone understood it.
Solution: Practice helps reduce the awkwardness in repeating thoughts or ideas. Certainly refine your message, but it’s ok to share that message more than once to inspire change.
2. Almost nothing is binary at the manager level.
Engineers live in a binary world where things can be broken down into 0 and 1, or true and false. It’s easy to apply this thinking across the board and be decisive.
Almost nothing in management is binary. here is a range of fuzzy grays on a day-to-day basis. Situations, decisions, plans all have elements of good and bad to them. It’s similar to architecture or system design, there are trade-offs in that nothing is right or wrong, it’s somewhere in between.
Solution: Embrace the gray and change your mindset. Instead of saying, “Is this right?” ask, “How will this help, what is good about it, what isn’t?” It’s important to acknowledge and be comfortable with the gray areas that exist in all situations, plans, and decisions you need to make.
3. The dreaded meetings.
Most people dislike meetings, especially when they are inefficient and take away from your problem-solving time, for engineers that’s coding time.
But as a manager, you can’t sit silently in the back of a meeting, duck out early, or leave the participation to someone else. Your role in meetings is to inspire change as a leader. And often you need to talk with others to inspire. Your role is to go into meetings and use them effectively to inspire the change in others that you’re looking for.
Solution: Hopefully in your career, you’ve experienced a meeting that wasn’t terrible. Use that meeting and manager as your template and lessons learned on how meetings can be effective and inspire alignment without being wasteful. The bottom line is to stop avoiding meetings and make them better by having an agenda and stay focused. If someone brings something up that is not part of the success criteria of the meeting, you’ll need to recognize what they’re saying but then explain that discussion is best had in another meeting or venue. That can be difficult for someone who is anti-confrontational but it will keep your meetings focused on what you need to accomplish.
4. Wins take time.
Our brains like wins, lots of wins. As engineers, we love completing tasks: the ticket is done, automated checks write, feature deployed. Your brain gets acclimated to constant achievements. It can be hard to shift into a role where wins are not as immediate.
In management and leadership wins take time, they develop over the course of days, months, and years. And if they do develop they are often partial or incomplete; many things are never “done.”
Solution: Find the satisfaction in the long game and value those incomplete wins and the little steps that happen while you’re inspiring change or helping a person or organization. Change your framing, it’s not, “Did I Win” instead ask, “Is it better than before? Value the wins of others, obviously you should never take credit for what people are doing but value them and their wins. The success is collective, recognize that.
5. Feelings are just as important as facts.
It is easy to see the value in facts and objectivity. We, engineers, are amazing with facts, but sometimes we prioritize facts at the expense of feelings.
But Feelings are first-rate. Feelings are a critical dimension to everything you think about when making plans and decisions. As Maya Angelou once said, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
Solution: Consider facts AND feelings. Build up your empathy skills: cognitive empathy is a really important gateway to empathetic concern and compassion.
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Every engineer can learn to be an effective leader. Hopefully, this list clears up some of the unknown-unknowns for those looking to build these skills. Learn more about leadership at Fearless:
