The Engineering Manager

Upwards?

Whilst we may typically think of the “management” part of being a manager as the relationship between yourself and those who report to you, it’s equally important to think about how to handle the relationship between you and your own manager. It’s critical to your happiness in the workplace, your career growth, and ultimately your success, as they will be judging your performance. By putting a concerted effort into getting the best out of the relationship with your own manager, you can be happier, more impactful and go further in your career.

As you begin to report higher up the org chart, you’ll naturally be dealing with people who are extremely busy. This is especially true if you are reporting to the CTO or CEO. Although you may report to someone who actively spends a scheduled portion of their week thinking about your own career growth, with the increased messiness and ambiguity at the upper echelon of organizations, this will become increasingly unlikely. Instead, you should take your relationship with your manager into your own hands. Set the agenda yourself and seek their advice, not the other way around.

Contracting again

Let’s start with first principles: perform the contracting exercise. We have gone into the contracting exercise in detail in a previous article, so do start there if you haven’t encountered it. If you are beginning a relationship with a new manager, then don’t wait for them to do this exercise with you; ask them to do it. Additionally, don’t worry if you have already worked for a manager for a period of time; the contracting exercise is a great refresher.

During the contracting exercise, you can confirm how best to report on progress, get support (in both directions), and discuss how your personalities may support or collide with each other. By identifying this up front, many real conflicts can be prevented by having this deeper understanding of how both of you operate.

How much communication?

Ask how much they need to know and when. I find it useful to get them to envision the following situations and see how they would best like to receive the information.

By which means, and how often, would they like to be informed of:

• Weekly and daily progress on projects that you are accountable for
• Something critically urgent happening (e.g. the entire app is down or someone wants to leave)
• Your staff’s performance, good or bad
• Administrative events such as your own sickness or needing to work from home

Some items they may not even need to know. I’ve reported to managers who like a constant flow of communication and those who prefer only to hear when something urgent happens, operating in the knowledge that all is under control unless notified otherwise.

The medium of communication is important too. Some managers may like these conversations to happen face to face, 1 to 1s, or via email digests. If you are reporting to the CTO or another board member, their time may be scarce and regular face to face catch-ups may be dramatically more effective than email or Slack. Or, the inverse could be true. Who knows without asking? Get this clear up front.

What makes them perform well?

Ask how your manager’s performance is being measured. Are they accountable for particular projects, or particular KPIs? How often are these checked and by whom? Are they accountable for a team or a division or an entire department of the business? Get clear on how your success in your own job feeds into their success.

This is also an opportunity to explore how you can grow in your role. Are there other facets of your manager’s job that could, with time, be delegated to you so that you can continue to level up? Typical items here are hiring, departmental processes, steering meetings and budgets. This discussion can produce a truly win-win situation: you can expand your own responsibility and impact on the business and they can have more time to focus on other aspects of their role that they enjoy more.

At some level, everyone is judged by delivering some project or initiative on time. A CTO will be judged by the output of the Engineering department. A team leader will be judged by the output of their team. However, are there other factors that they are being measured against that you could indirectly contribute to? There may be a push to grow the department by 20% by the end of the year. There may be a concerted effort to save money on hosting costs. There may be diversity goals in hiring for the company as a whole. See if you can contribute to these as part of your own role.

What is good performance?

In order to get a better idea of how they judge performance, ask them to identify the characteristics of a current top performer in the company. You can begin to understand the traits that they value in their organization.

Do they prefer staff who just get things done without needing steer, or do they prefer to be involved in decisions beforehand so they can oversee? Do they value those that communicate frequently about their work, or is no news good news? As a manager, tapping into their vision for their organization can promote good discussion about how you too can contribute to fulfilling that vision.

The visibility of your work

Since your manager will be delivering your performance reviews, ask them the thought process that they go through when writing it. Do they primarily measure your performance on the frequency and quality of projects that you are delivering, or is that just part of a greater picture including coaching and mentoring, the happiness of your team and success in hiring and retaining staff? By discovering this framework now, you can use it to frame your own activities in your role, and your own staff in theirs.

It is also key to ask how they measure this progress. Is it a mixture of shipped projects plus a subjective measure based on their view of your within the organization, or would they like you to keep track of your goals concretely so they can review them regularly as the year goes on?

In summary

Managing upwards is not discussed as widely as managing your own direct reports. However, understanding this relationship is critical to your success. Many individuals in an organization can see the relationship as entirely one way; that the manager will always create the best environment for the direct report to succeed so they can be a passive participant in it. I don’t think this is the best way to handle this relationship; it requires effort from both parties continually.

There can often be fundamental misunderstandings from both sides that can manifest in conflict, or even worse, in a bad performance review. Thus, in the same way as managing your own direct reports, it is also your responsibility to work on the relationship with your own manager so that you can both ultimately succeed. Ask!

How should I best make use of my time?

In the previous post, we looked at some techniques that I find useful for keeping all of my information under control. Certainly, for the new manager, striving for a situation where each day has structure and feels more regimented is a positive place to start. However, once that structure is in place, how should one engage in activities and conversations to best create a positive outcome for the business?

For this article, we’ll expand on 4 categories that were outlined in what I feel is the quintessential book on management: High Output Management by Andy Grove*. He uses these categories to frame the different types of interactions that happen in the workplace.

These are:

• Information gathering
• Decision making
• Nudging
• Being a role model

Information gathering

As you may have gathered (pun intended) from the previous articles, as a manager, the information base that you hold is critical. This is why I recommend having everything documented wherever possible: 1 to 1 notes, actions from meetings, a place to capture informal information, and so on. Your knowledge base is what you use to understand the many activities of the business and fundamentally what you base your decisions on. Information gathering feeds this knowledge base.

It is worth noting that information can be gathered in many different places other than formal interactions and meetings. For example, you could be having a conversation at the coffee machine with your colleague, and then she mentions that her team is building a new API. You realize that this is incredibly helpful for your own team, so you note it down. Weeks later, your Product Owner notifies the team that this particular feature arriving in another of the businesses’ products would be perfect for your own. You already know that an API was written, so you make the connection between the teams.

Keep adding more information to your knowledge base. Always. Keep as little in your head as possible. Tools such as Google Drive and Evernote make this so much easier than it was 10 years ago, and they’re all free. For me, the simple act of writing things down also commits them to my memory better than if I’d just made a mental note.

Decision making

This is one of the more obvious answers to the question “What does a manager do?” You can make decisions of all sizes. You could make a small decision as to grant a holiday request or not during a busy period of work, or you could make a large multi-million-pound decision as to whether to migrate the entire infrastructure into the cloud or keep it within your own data center.

Always take decision making seriously. It is easy to forget that there are many in the business who do not have the power to make decisions, so you must always give them your full attention and take responsibility for the ramifications of making said decisions. Every decision is an inflection point: should we hire Bob or Susan? Should we split the team into two teams? Should we refuse to begin estimating the work required for this project when the proposal for the product is so unclear? Decisions such as these may seem like they are small in that moment, but extrapolated over time and bringing in the cost of the different outcomes, they are actually big decisions. Treat them as such.

Nudging

The concept of nudging is influencing a decision by contributing your own viewpoint to the discussion. For example, you may be involved in a discussion about whether to build or buy some particular software, and you make it clear how you feel about the situation. You are not the decision maker, but you can influence the decision. Like decision making, nudging can occur for decisions of all sizes. You may put your viewpoint across about whether to book a meeting immediately or tomorrow, or equally state your case in a discussion as to whether to open an office in the UK or abroad.

Try to view your daily interactions through the lens of nudging, and you’ll soon see that there are ample opportunities to broaden your influence on the organization, thus increasing your output as a manager.

Being a role model

Being a good manager is about walking the walk as well as talking the talk. The best way to demonstrate to your staff and your peers is to lead by example. Give talks, get involved in day-to-day discussions and contribute technically if you have the time and inclination. Demonstrating the standards that you wish to see others perform to is the best way to create change: lead from the front. If you wish for your team to communicate better in person but you personally prefer to talk to them over email rather than face to face, then it’s unlikely that the situation is going to improve with the rapidity you desire.

You can also be a role model for your department by making connections outside of your typical influence sphere. If you are in Engineering, for example, you may have regular check-ins with influential staff in other areas of the business, such as commercial. These connections can give vital feedback, help you discuss ideas and issues, and identify stakeholders for future projects.

A day through a lens

Let’s have a look at a fairly typical day and see how we can categorize the interactions.

8:45: You sit down and prioritize your to-do list. You read your emails and unread Slack messages. Here you are information gathering.

9:00: You answer your emails. You contribute to various discussions with your viewpoint, which is nudging. You decide to make an offer to a candidate you interviewed yesterday. That’s decision making.

9:10: While in the kitchen and making a tea, you have a conversation with a colleague and learn what they’re working on. Information gathering. You share how your own team tackled a similar technical issue with a degree of success. You suggest taking a similar approach. Nudging.

10:00: You attend a meeting to review a number of CVs that have come in over the last few days. You choose which to invite to a first interview. Decision making. You suggest to the CTO that it is a good idea to open the position out to more junior candidates now that the local universities are a few months away from having large numbers of students graduate. Nudging.

11:00: You are in a 1 to 1 with a direct report. Lots of nudging but less decision making as ideally you want to steer them into making their own decisions. You learn a lot of things about what she has been working on this last week, and how the issues have overcome. Information gathering. You offer some opinions of how problems might be tackled. Nudging.

12:00: Lunch. You gather some food, rather than information, at this point. However, you do have a conversation with a colleague whilst eating about his experiences using Jenkinsfiles, and your team has moved across to using these recently. You give some advice about who to talk to. Nudging.

12:30: You catch a colleague in the breakout area who shipped some new functionality last week. You tell her that she did a brilliant job and that customers are really appreciative. You do this because you want your department to get better at delivering honest feedback. Being a role model.

13:00: You go through your emails and messages, both information gathering and nudging. You have a decision to make about whether some work should be put into your team’s backlog or not. You decide that you need to talk more in person, so you set up a meeting for later.

15:00: You have the meeting about the work. Your product owner describes how the work can make your own product more compelling, and you also know that you have the technical expertise to build it in such a way that other teams can use it too. You both decide to take the work on because contributing to other teams as well as your own is a good example to set. Being a role model.

16:30: You spend the last couple of hours in the quiet going through items on your to-do list. One of these items is preparing a technical talk on your latest project (being a role model). At the end of the day, you read your email (information gathering), review some pull requests (decision making) and take part in a discussion in the backend development channel about logging (nudging).

In summary

When viewed through the lens of the 4 key managerial activities, it is possible to see how even fairly mundane interactions can be transformed into an opportunity to exert your influence and improve the organization that you work in. Try it out. It’s fun!

* I’ve taken the liberty of using an affiliate link for the High Output Management book. If you happen to buy it, which I highly recommend you do, I make a few pennies that contribute to my coffee spend when writing these posts. Thank you kindly.