The Engineering Manager

This article is part of a series on managing managers.

There are two universal truths that you simply cannot fight:

• As a manager of managers, there will always be more to do than you have the time to do yourself.
• Your direct reports, if they are talented, will always be looking for career progression.

If you only consider these truths individually, then it can cause difficult problems to emerge:

• Just how are you meant to get all of this stuff done, all of the time?
• And how are you meant to find the time in order to create continual career progression for all of your direct reports?

Tricky, huh? Indeed. 

Well, it turns out that if you consider the truths as interlinked, then you can use them together in order for one to solve the other, and vice versa. You solve that problem through delegation of more of your own role to your direct reports.

Often managers of managers don’t do this because they feel that their work is somehow above the remit of the managers that report to them; they think of each manager having their own concisely defined functional unit, so, of course, that division wide or department wide issue is something that only they can deal with themselves, with no help from others. 

However, that logic causes some bad side effects:

• The manager of managers is continually overworked by all manner of things that they think are outside of the remit of their direct reports.
• The direct reports feel that their own team (and world) is small, especially as they get more effective at their job.
• The manager of managers never lifts the lid on the kinds of tasks and issues that they are working on. This makes their direct reports feel like there is an element of secrecy to their work, or even worse, that they don’t trust their managers with the details. Oh, and even worse… 
• Their managers think that their boss doesn’t do anything useful with their time outside of their meetings. Ouch.

So, none of those things are good, but they’re easily solvable through delegation.

Create transparency

Firstly, as a manager of managers, for as many things that you work on as possible, work on them in the open. There’s a number of ways in which you can do this:

• Talk about them in your one-to-ones with your direct reports. Put an item on your agenda every week to talk through all of the things that you’re working on and gather their input. They’ll always have good ideas.
• If you have a Slack channel for your and your managers, blog your progress. Work in the open and you’ll see lots of interesting and helpful conversations spin out.
• Send a weekly update. You could start or end the week (or both!) with a digest of everything that’s going on in your world so that your managers understand where they and their team fits into the wider whole.

So that’s pretty simple: just a bit of writing and talking.

Delegate, delegate, delegate

The next step is delegation. Continually think about how you can carve apart your total area of responsibility and how you can begin to delegate that out to your direct reports. 

For example, if you’re responsible for doing the budget, why not set up a delegated process that both gives your managers more responsibility for the spend in their teams, which is both empowering and a new skill to learn, but most importantly, allows you get your own job done more easily whilst being less of a bottleneck?

Quite often those at the Director level will hold their own tasks at a distance. This is because they feel that their Engineering Managers are going to resist contributing because it’s distracting from the usual day-to-day of running their team. 

However, delegating, even just a bit so that you work on the delegated tasks together, is an act of trust, an opportunity for a direct report to learn new skills, and for you to be proactively planning your succession every single day.

So, are you sitting on that administrative task that you just haven’t gotten round to doing? Invite others into your world through delegation. Trust me: it’s the best situation for everyone. Your direct reports, even though they’re all managing their own teams, are your team. 

Make them feel like they are part of one.

This article is part of a series on managing managers.

I was flicking through my dusty copy of High Output Management recently and I was reminded of this fantastic piece of advice. On reflection, I’ve realized that I’ve been using this approach without explicitly remembering where I learned about it, so it was pleasant to be reminded of its provenance.

A common route for a manager to become a manager of managers is through rapid growth in the size of a company. This can happen because of venture capital investment, through mergers or acquisitions, or, if you’re lucky, through good old organic growth.

During these periods of time, more engineers get hired into existing teams in order to get things moving faster. However, there’s a limit to the number of direct reports that any given manager can reliably have, and the rule of thumb is usually around 5-8, depending on who you ask, and on the preferences of the person doing the managing. When thinking about the limit, you can sometimes replace a direct report with a major initiative, such as being part of a project, guild or committee, if you’re thinking about how to balance your effort between individual contribution and people management.

Splitting the atom

So, what tends to happen when a manager starts to get too many direct reports? Well, the answer is usually quite straightforward: try to split the team in order to create two smaller teams. That makes a lot of sense. So what might happen next? Well, our manager could create two smaller teams and promote or hire two new Engineering Managers (EMs) to run those teams, reporting to them. It might look something like this.

But wait! This is actually quite bad. Why?

• Our new Director of Engineering has made themselves redundant. By going from managing too many people to just 2, they’ve delegated all of their responsibility without the existence of other impactful activities that they can fill their time with. They’ve entered on the job retirement. It’s not a good place to be in, especially in the future if there are cuts or redundancies on horizon.
• They have no way of getting involved with their teams effectively. Either they’re going to have to work very closely with the teams – which would be meddling, since they already have EMs running those teams – or they’re going to have to stay quite far away, which means that they can’t have much impact other than coaching the two EMs.

Assuming growth doesn’t continue indefinitely, our Director of Engineering is going to find themselves bored, frustrated or leaving the company – or even all three! What can they do?

A better solution

In order to not make themselves redundant, the manager that is splitting the team should instead promote or hire one EM to run one of the sub-teams, then run the other team themselves by acting as the EM even though they’ve moved up into a Director of Engineering role. That would look something like this.

This is much better! What it means is:

• The Director of Engineering still has enough direct reports to remain productive and impactful. In the example above, assuming the new EM was promoted, they’ve gone from 9 direct reports to 5 – from around the maximum to the minimum – whilst still having the responsibility of running one team themselves.
• By acting as an Engineering Manager, it doesn’t cause imbalance in the org chart. By representing the role as “acting as”, the org chart looks like two teams reporting to two EMs, rather than one team being demoted a layer beneath another one. This keeps everyone happy.
• Our new manager of managers only has to ramp up one new manager at a time, rather than two. It’s hard enough to do just one, after all. This means that the right time and energy can be devoted to the task, whilst giving one of the teams their familiar, existing manager.

Although this approach may seem like common sense, it’s surprising just how many times you see the initial, bad pattern happening in growing organizations. It introduces way too much change at once, resulting in too many new managers needing to learn the ropes at a given time and thus disrupting multiple teams, and encourages bad managerial behaviours such as meddling and on the job retirement. The latter is most worrisome, since your emerging leader may begin pushing themselves out of the organization.

By adopting the second pattern instead, you get smoother transitions during growth phases and better retention of momentum when teams split, and most importantly, if you’re the manager doing the splitting, you stay needed, impactful and productive.