The Engineering Manager

What do I even do any more?

Zoe is settling into her second year of being a team lead. Her responsibilities have grown considerably since she took the role. She’s taking a lead on hiring JavaScript developers in her department, she’s involved in an initiative to speed up deploys of the application, and her team has grown considerably and require much more day-to-day organization and interaction when compared to the three person team that she started with. That’s when things are going smoothly, which isn’t always the case.

She’s beginning to feel frustrated. Every day she tries her best to ring fence time to open her IDE and contribute. But every time that she does, she finds that something gets in the way: an interruption, an email, and sometimes even a nagging feeling of guilt that there is something else that she should be pointing her attention towards rather than producing lines of code. She feels conflicted because she is meant to be setting a good example, yet she is the most unreliable developer on her team.

She remembers how easy it was to feel satisfied before she became a manager. She would tangibly produce positive change to the codebase every day through writing new features, deleting unused cruft and refactoring. She felt like she was contributing at a high level. But now many of her days feel scattershot and unfinished.

Is this her fault?

The frustration of management

Management and leadership are messy. Rarely is any day the same as the last. With time and continued exposure, this is exactly what makes the role so interesting. However, for new managers that are coming from an individual contributor role, this is what can make their new role overwhelming, exhausting, and unsatisfying. This is especially true for those that have perfectionist qualities: the mindset that made them great programmers can work against them as a manager resulting in them feeling like they are doing an utterly terrible job.

Yet, to fight the messy nature of the job is to ultimately lose. Like life, it can only be controlled by best effort. Events will always happen that will be impossible to pre-empt, so the sooner that you are open to accepting this situation then the more relaxed and effective that you will be as a manager. You are now managing humans rather than code, and humans can be much more varied and unpredictable.

Letting go

Since management at its worst is being exposed to pandemonium, you want to begin to let go of your previous wish to control everything. So let’s start letting go. But what does that mean?

• Accept that no day is the same. You will have days of both blissful organization and progress and days of utter chaos and emotion. Both are OK, and both are equally part of the job. Any effort to control exactly what each day will be like is doomed to failure and frustration. You can only do your best and accept that it is all you can do.
• Accept that your output is less concrete. When you were an individual contributor you could judge that you’d had a successful day easily because there were so many checkpoints that were under your control: lines of code written, pull requests reviewed or merged, bugs fixed and features deployed to live. Managerial work has very few clear checkpoints: you are sailing the boat as best as you can in the changing winds. The sooner you are accepting of this, the better.
• Accept that your old methods of control are no longer useful. If, through feelings of being uncomfortable, you default to your old methods of control even though they’re not what you primarily should be doing (e.g. doing technical busywork that should be delegated) then you need to reassess whether that is the best way that you can increase your team’s output. It probably isn’t. Get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

For the new manager, these principles are unnatural and require constant practice. Make the act of reflection on how you are spending your time a weekly conversation with your own manager so you can ensure you are leading yourself and your team in the right direction. Manage, don’t meddle.

Breathing space

By accepting that you shouldn’t meddle, how can you create the space to allow yourself to become a more effective manager? Here’s some ideas of things that you can do.

• Delegate by default. When you feel the urge to dive in to a particular piece of work, ask yourself whether you are the right person to be doing it. Sure, you may be theoretically more available than your team to quickly complete a task before they can get around to it, but fundamentally your role isn’t to be the broom wagon behind your team. Instead, you should be at the front of the peloton. Unless it’s something only you can do, you should be protecting your own time and delegating consistently to your staff.
• Purposely block out time in your calendar. To prevent yourself from getting involved in busywork or unimportant meetings, block out set mornings or afternoons in your calendar regularly for yourself. How you choose to fill this time is up to you. You could use the time to sit and think and plan for the future, or to review the work that your team has been doing, or even go and connect with your peers in your company. Although your previous life as an individual contributor would encourage you to not do this and instead immediately pick up another ticket, you need to become comfortable with some unstructured drifting as often the best ideas emerge when you are not busy.
• Ask your boss how you could contribute to their initiatives. You can force yourself to think outside of your own team by asking to be part of wider initiatives that your manager is running. These could be departmental issues such as defining career paths, improving the hiring process, or exposing yourself to other parts of the business: what’s going on in Sales right now? What about Product, or Marketing? Exposure to new people and topics help you grow as a professional, expand your network, and once again, help you have some new and interesting ideas.

In summary

Although it might be unnatural, you need to let go of control in order to be comfortable and effective as a manager. It also will protect your sanity.

Instead of concerning yourself with busywork or tasks that used to bring you satisfaction as an individual contributor, you need to purposefully take a step back and allow yourself the space to roam. Not only does this allow you to be more available reactively when your staff need you, it also creates a space that allows you to think of the vision that you have for the future of your team and department.

What are they up to?

Have you ever noticed that your preconceptions can affect your judgement? Let’s test that theory out.

Imagine, if you will, that there are two hypothetical engineers. The first, who we will call Alice, is a total superstar in your department. Everyone thinks that she is brilliant. If you had to get something critical done you would give it to her. In fact, you’re not sure how you’d get things done without her around! The second engineer, who we will call Bob, is the opposite of Alice. He hasn’t been performing well recently, and has been finding it hard to produce quality work on time. He’s going through a performance improvement plan as we speak, and it’s uncertain as to whether he’s going to pass it. It doesn’t seem like his heart is in it any more.

Given what we know about Alice and Bob, what would you think that they were up to if:

• You couldn’t find them at their desk
• They were working from home
• They were getting in at 11AM
• They were leaving early twice a week?

Would you assume that if you couldn’t find Alice it was because she was attending to something very important, or in a meeting? What about Bob? Would you assume he had slept in? If Alice was working from home, would you assume that she is trying her best to juggle life commitments or that she really wants to concentrate on a critical piece of work? If the same situation occurred for Bob, would you assume that he’s slacking off instead?

These preconceptions won’t be coming from you alone. They’ll be coming from others in the office too, regardless of their fairness.

As a manager, you’ll be responsible for the flexibility that you give your staff. How can you make sure that you give that flexibility fairly in a way that doesn’t undermine the respect that people have for you?

Chits

Let’s talk about chits. What are they?

By definition, a chit is a short official note, typically recording something which is owed. For example, a chit could be written by a guest taking something from the drinks cabinet; a promise that it’ll get paid back later. In the UK I’ve been more privy to the term IOU rather than chit.

If you were the owner of the drinks cabinet, you may feel that if the person leaving the chits was your best friend, then you would be totally fine with them having them stack up continually over time; you’re 100% sure that they’ll pay you back as you trust them. If the chits were left by a stranger, especially by one who you didn’t trust, then you probably wouldn’t be comfortable with them taking anything at all in the first place.

You can apply this same logic to flexibility that you give your employees. The more trustworthy and high-performing the employee, the more chits that they are allowed to have. This gives your best staff the most allowances, and sends a message that this flexibility is something that is earned and not a right. Your staff that get complete flexibility in when to work from home, when to arrive and leave, and how to structure their time should be the ones that set a great example in the output and impact of their work. Others should strive to emulate their behavior, thus earning similar levels of flexibility for themselves.

What sort of chits can you give?

What kinds of things could you be offering flexibility over? This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should illustrate where you can reward consistent good performance with extra allowances and relaxed constraints.

• Working from home: Your best performers should be able to work from home whenever they need. This can be for life reasons such as needing to accept a delivery or attend a school play, or it could be that they want to create a day free of interruptions to concentrate on work before a deadline. Perhaps they generate their best creative ideas when in solitude. To begin with, you should establish a way for your staff to request working from home arrangements with a specified reason, but with time for your top performers should be able to do it without needing to ask ahead of time. Now, depending on a person’s role, working from home may or may not be particularly impactful. A senior manager being at home for one day may make little difference other than them not being around for impromptu interactions, but a senior engineer with a junior team can have a greater negative effect by not being there to mentor them.
• Flexibility over start and end times: Often an employee’s contract will define standard working hours, but with time your best performers should be able to come in and go home on their own schedule, within reasonable bounds. Those that are the highest performing will most probably be working hard all day anyway, so if they’re tired of thinking of complex problems by the late afternoon, why not have them go home and recharge?
• Minimal notice for time off: Your best staff are intrinsically motivated to do their best, so if they request tomorrow off, you should be a position to trust them and just let them do it. They’ll juggle their work commitments and communication with others as well as they have previously demonstrated to you.
• Choices over upcoming projects: This is a fun one. Your best performing staff can have a say on the projects that they want to work on throughout the year. After all, you know that they’re going to make them a success, right? This leads to better performance through alignment of their passions and interests to their work for you.

Being open and honest about chits

Your system of chits shouldn’t be something that you should have written down and available for all to see. This is a system that you should negotiate one-to-one with your employees. However, you should let your employees know that with time, as they increase their tenure and impact, you, and therefore the company, can begin to be much more flexible with their working arrangements.

Chits should not encourage entitlement. You need to be clear that the way that you offer flexibility as a manager is not because of unprofessional favoritism; it’s another part of the benefits package for top performers. Those that you offer the most flexibility to should clearly be your best staff, otherwise you are open to arguments from others that they should be allowed to work from home three days a week simply because Alice does as well.

An approach to implementing chits when hiring new staff, or having new staff report to you, is to explicitly outline how this system works. You can state that you can indeed be extremely flexible with working arrangements as long as there is clear proof that the particular member of staff is delivering to a high standard. To begin with, be clear that you would like requests for additional flexibility to be asked for on a case-by-case basis with an explicit reason for doing so. You can then explain that with time, and with demonstrable good performance and trust, you will relax your grip on requests and allow higher levels of autonomy. Each of your staff acts as a role model for others in the department and you want to make sure that those with maximum chits are unquestionably your best, and that everyone can clearly see the correlation between performance and allowances.

In summary

You should openly encourage your staff to have as much flexibility over their work-life balance as possible, but be firm that the most flexibility stems from the best performance. Those that have too much flexibility without having earned it can set the wrong example for others that they work with.

Be fair and firm and let performance determine chits. It drives the right behavior.