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Engineers who become managers quickly find that the authority that comes with the manager title isn’t as helpful as they thought it would be. First, even when you have the role power as the boss to tell your team what to do, the effectiveness of that power diminishes the more often you have to use…
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As you develop your leadership and management skills, eventually you’ll probably be asked to take some sort of standardized assessment. You’ll also likely run across someone who suggests that you have your team take one as well. But are these assessments helpful or harmful? Well … they can be either. I tend to classify them…
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As a leader with an engineering background, you may have a skill in pattern recognition that helps you troubleshoot and resolve technical problems. When you see a certain failure mode, you know that it’s generally triggered by a small handful of possible causes. If we’re not careful, though, that pattern recognition that was once a…
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Silence is data, and most people either don’t notice it or misinterpret it. Silence can be seen as apathy, ignorance, or resistance, and it’s easy for our personal biases to prompt us to jump to a quick conclusion. But the data of silence may be telling a very different story, and when your track record…
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Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. If you’ve been in engineering leadership for any length of time, you understand that our field has a long history of bad metric targets that have driven engineers to find creative and unproductive ways to game the system. At the same…
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I’ve mentioned in the past how emphasizing Mean Time To Resolution over Mean Time Between Failures can be just as effective in human relationships as it is in computer operations engineering. When I think about it, I see that there are many other engineering principles that can serve as insightful metaphors for human system designs…
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“If you want something done, ask a busy person.” If all you care about is one single task, then that common wisdom might be good advice. But if you make it a habit or build a system around that strategy, some day it will crumble. A similar danger shows up when your team has a…
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I don’t hear the phrase “quiet quitting” as much as I used to. Maybe it’s not as trendy to use those words as it once was. But managers still face the challenge of inspiring team members to give what has long been called “discretionary effort.” Especially when you personally believe in the mission of the…
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Technical experts who find themselves in management often fall into a trap that creates almost insurmountable relationship barriers. One of the valuable skills of an engineer is the ability to recognize potential technical problems with an idea or strategy. For an engineer who is responsible to build something safe and stable, that skill is invaluable.…
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed from these videos, by my thoughts and emotions have a tendency to leak through my facial expressions. I’ll be sitting in a group conversation, strategizing over whether and when I want to insert myself, and the facilitator will stop and say, “I can tell Steve is just itching to…
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When I was a relatively new manager, my boss let me know that I needed to keep them better informed. Something had happened that involved my team and my boss was surprised by it in a meeting with their peers. They told me I needed to do a better job communicating with them, but at…
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One of the big contributors to what I call “promotion remorse” is a vague and surprising sense of loss mixed in with everything you gain in a new management role. A short-lived celebration over a bigger title and possibly greater compensation is overshadowed by a longer-term realization. You’re losing measurable individual output that comes from…
Musings
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