Alice and Bob are Engineering Managers (EM).

Case 1: Alice is moving on to a new job and some of her reports are shocked because they accepted their current job offer thinking they would get a great manager like Alice and were very happy and comfortable with her.

Case 2: Bob is worried that if he leaves then his team will be shattered.

I recently coached 2 folks on these scenarios.

Both these situations indicate Alice and Bob are doing great jobs as managers, but it does highlight the teams have not been setup for the EM itself to level up. While there is no right or a wrong definition for the EM role, my definition is here, there are offcourse stages for the EM itself to evolve. Let’s look into it.

Stages of EM evolution

The first-time EM

A new EM first has to demonstrate success as an engineer plus manager. This will entail the EM being mostly hands on with the engineering tasks they previously did while attempting at managerial tasks. Learning to effectively manage time and choosing priorities wisely will be the key to excel to next stage.

EM centric to EM delegated

After becoming an effective first-time EM, it is now time to scale. This is also the time to evaluate if one enjoys being an EM itself. It is best to try the EM role while being in the current role as an Individual Contributor (IC). Leveling up in the EM role can be either tried in the current role or in a new job. What is EM centric, needs to be EM delegated.

How I adopted my leadership style to evolve as an EM

This part was hard for me, because my younger self did enjoy the EM centred attention, my leadership style being “leading from the front”. I had to understand that for me to level up I had to step back and adopt the “servant style leadership”. I had to delegate, trust the team to be effective in my absence, observe and coach the team on the missing points for them to be effective during my absence, automate things when necessary.

Scaling the art of delegation as an EM

As a first time EM, I did manage the art of delegation quite well. But at that time, the delegation was mostly around my IC role and responsibilities to others in the team so I could take up more of managerial tasks. When I wanted to grow beyond, I had to scale the art of delegation where I had to delegate the EM tasks itself in a way that they are either automated, documented, effectively managed so that I didn’t have to present everywhere and at the same time coach the team so that they could take up additional responsibilities. Note: In this case I was still the EM on the team, I either had more than 1 team or had to take up additional responsibilities than the normal EM role asked for.

Now, my goto model to try this out is the “rotational role” where everyone in the team gets to be resilient enough to be able to do anything.

At a later stage when I started managing other EMs, it involved the art of delegation where I had to trust other EMs to either replace my role with my former direct teams. I will cover this scenario in an upcoming post.

How to Evolve as an EM

Coming back to our case studies listed in the beginning of this post, Alice and Bob had to adopt the EM delegated leadership styles. Alice had to coach her reports to trust her leadership and when every team member is resilient then they can be force multipliers and change enablers to ensure Alice’s leadership continues even with Alice being absent.

Bob had to move beyond the mentality of being a first time EM and learn to trust the team to be in auto pilot mode so that he can himselft level up.