I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about how to scale the systems that you and your team of engineers are designing. But have you thought about how you personally scale in your engineering management career?
Scaling yourself doesn’t just mean managing more engineers. It’s about having a greater impact, handling higher levels of complexity, and being valuable across more initiatives. It’s about feeling less stress and anxiety over the work that you’re responsible for.
With that understanding, scaling also doesn’t mean working more hours or creating more output in those hours.
Instead, this kind of scaling means adopting a completely different line of thinking.
When I was early in my management career, my attention was on one project at a time. I focused my energy on corralling my current project over the finish line at all costs.
But learning to scale myself meant looking beyond simply delivering the next release on time. It meant paying attention to what was important outside of just my own team.
I didn’t start out being responsible for the success an entire porfolio of projects, but scaling myself did require me to understand how my projects fit into the larger portfolio, how my team’s work and the work of my peers’ teams related to each other.
I had to learn that success on my team’s projects was irrelevant.
What was important was the success of the whole portfolio. I had to learn that my team’s value came from how our successes – and sacrifices – contributed to the success of the team I reported into.
Step one of scaling yourself is to change how you see yourself. Instead of primarily identifying as the leader of your team, concentrate on your role as one contributor of many to the success of the team you report into. Other mindset shifts often follow from this one.
If you’d like to scale yourself and become the manager your team needs without burning out or second-guessing yourself, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to begin the conversation.
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