Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

Leadership is challenging: where your work used to be about you and what value you brought to a team, your work is now about enabling everyone around you.

“The fact that you’re worried that you’re not a good manager is a key part of being a good manager.” What she means by that is, you should take this job seriously. “Bad” managers are often flippant about the role and the consequences of it. Caring is vital to doing this job well.

“All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message.”

Here’s an example of values I’ve put forth on my teams: We celebrate everyone’s wins as though they’re our own. No compare and despair. Be empowered to forge forward, we hired you because you’re an expert. Make mistakes. Choose impact over butts in seats (We’re not counting hours here, focus on making an impact and work when and how you want).

I feel strongly that people should seek out work on teams that don’t violate their own value structures, ideally places where they feel the most alignment—perhaps not perfect alignment, as it’s also nice to learn from folks who have a different perspective. A few major, fundamental values should be aligned. Otherwise, work can feel even tougher than the job at hand. When you’re misaligned, burnout is inevitable. Working on a team with values that largely align with your own is nice, because you can really dig into the makeup of the culture on your team. Clarity is what we’re aiming for here. Clarity is key.

A 2010 study by Matthias R. Mehl, et al., titled “Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations,” found a meaningful correlation between the depth of conversation quality and the depth of personal connection: when you force yourself out of small talk and into subjects that matter to you, people tend to build trust faster.

Fundamentally, all groups within a company are part of one whole. The leadership team is also a team, and should also be treated as your team. How you speak about this team is equally important.

The culture and morale on your team is a large part of your responsibility. I’ve long felt that happiness wasn’t just “nice to have” at a job. I’ve noticed over many years that the teams that are able to express joy and humor together are often the most productive, both in good times and when things get tough. It wasn’t until I read Drive by Daniel Pink and The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor that I realized science backs up my observation, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Happiness at work isn’t some “hippie” concept. It’s also connected to the bottom line.

A few conditions need to be met for your engineers to get into flow state in their work: You are aligned on the base premises of the work. Your work is challenging, but not impossible. You feel a sense of togetherness with your team and peers, that you’re all building something together and have each other’s backs. Your moral values are not at odds with the work at hand. You feel respected. You get fair and timely feedback on your tasks. This does not necessarily have to be human feedback. It can also come in the form of compilation success, tests passing, or PRs (pull requests) going through. Upon completing tasks and working hard for the company, you get fair pay, bonuses, promotions, and raises. You feel a loss of sense of self when performing your work. You are doing something for the sake of the task, not for politics or to be right. Rather you are doing the best work possible for the best possible outcomes. As such, you care more about continuous improvements than your own ego. You feel like people believe in you and what you’re working on.

From here, it’s probably pretty clear what you do: keep revisiting the list! I try to set a reminder in our 1:1 doc to revisit the 30/90 plan in about a month. When we check in, we see how each task is coming along, putting little checkmarks next to what’s done. I’ll sometimes put a celebration emoji on something they did particularly well; I believe it’s important to celebrate those as successes, even if it makes me sound like Mr. Rogers. Show folks that you appreciate their work and how far they’ve come. Then you can carve out another

This process also gives you a framework for working with people if something doesn’t go well. If you have set clear expectations, both tactically and strategically, you can revisit these expectations down the line if things aren’t going well. Again it’s best if the employee owns this, so as you talk through line items of what’s expected and where they are, ask them about this delta, and see what they say. Typically I have found that when I build trust with a person, and they are able to own their responsibilities, they are pretty honest about what they are doing well and what they can be doing better, as well as their challenges. If you see a large enough delta between what you both committed to and what work is being done, it can be tempting to attribute this delta to laziness. A lot of things are misattributed to laziness that have some other root cause, and yet they appear externally as laziness. If someone isn’t getting their work done, please do your best to explore further with them before writing them off. If you say someone is “lazy,” that is an immovable character assessment and absolves you as a manager from figuring out their motivations, potential misalignments, or challenging external factors that might be impacting their work.

Instead I have to ask questions of these very smart, very capable teams who know their space and framework well. When we talk about strategy, I ask questions like, “Is this API definition the best we can offer our users? We are getting feedback that it should be revisited.” Or, “Is this the authoring format that will carry this framework forward for the next ten years?”

Like it or not, when you enter leadership roles, your words have weight. Something that has seemed like harmless venting in the past now has the potential to create large rifts in your organization. Acknowledging issues is important, but even the slightest misstep can demoralize people. Be careful with your words. Be careful when representing yourself as the only person who can guide your team. Be careful to give credit when it’s due. Be careful to celebrate successes and be sober (but strategic) when talking about problems, without blame.

try my best to draw it at: What can I say that would not embarrass me if another person or group heard it? Have I given the party mentioned this feedback directly? Being human and honest is good. Trashing other people is not. My suggestion is to be as honest as you can without negatively impacting others.

A typical process for giving feedback could look like this: Do the pre-work of hearing how your team member likes to get feedback. Make sure the feedback is necessary. Check in with your own motivations and biases. Give them specific feedback as soon as you can, framing it in a way that they may best be able to hear it. Keep the conversation open, and allow them to ask questions. Talk through expectations and what could be better in the future. If your feedback is related to an HR violation, be very clear about next steps and follow-up.

Is the feedback necessary is important

If on the other hand, the answer is “Because I don’t like X,” you may have some more digging to do within yourself even before talking to the other person. Why does X upset you? Is it a you thing or a them thing? If it’s a you thing, is it something you should try to work out on your own? Feedback is a tool and can be weaponized for our own insecurities and blind spots if we’re not thinking things through.

Is this useful or from a place of frustration with a behaviour

Sometimes people use an agenda to write down thoughts before the meeting, and I strongly suggest steering clear of this. There’s nothing wrong with a person who keeps notes for the meeting, but if you come to a meeting where an agenda is locked top to bottom with material, it can sometimes shut down the collaborative aspect of the meeting, which means it shouldn’t be a meeting at all; it should just be a shared doc, to be consumed async. Part of the purpose of the meeting is the discussion itself. Again, louder: Part of the purpose of the meeting is the discussion

Then we stated the shared goal from both parties, as well as risks and constraints that may play a part in some of the conflicts that need to be ironed out. You’ll note in the last sentence above, we try to tie a knot for a vision of stability that addresses both parties’ understandable needs.

There are several project management framework systems of ownership you can explore, such as DACI (driver, improver, contributor, and informed), which separates out each stakeholder so that everyone knows their role. There are several others, such as RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) and RAPID (recommend, agree, perform, input, decide). Use whichever system makes the most sense for your organization.

“You have to know your preferences well, because no matter what you do, someone will tell you you’re wrong.”

Objectives should be high-level goals that inspire a picture of the future and imagination. For instance, at a point in Chrome’s history, their objective was to “make the browser an operating system,” and a point in Microsoft’s history when their objective was to put “a computer in every household.” You can see how these high-level objectives might inspire all sorts of work to be done. And everyone can check their work against such a goal.

Key Results are specific measurable pieces of data over time. For instance, “I would like to grow users” would not work as a key result; but “We need to triple signups by next year” would work. For Chrome in 2009, their original strategy was “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” but the actual key result was “111 million weekly active users by the year’s end.”

I explained that 1:1s and team meetings (on teams that reported to me and also the leadership team) were the most important part of my work; if I wasn’t supporting those teams I was on, not only was I not doing my job, I also didn’t have enough information from my teams to coordinate with anyone else on their initiatives. Your values have to be reflected in what you schedule. If you say you care most about your family, and make no time for them, then you’re not honoring your own value. If you say you care most about creating a supportive work environment and never take time to meet with your team, your values are misaligned.

To be a resilient manager, you have to forgive yourself. You’ll be more productive on some days (or hell, even years!) than you will be on others. That’s okay. Life is full of ebbs and flows.

People you see on social media might only be showing their successes—the higher their follower count, the more harassment they get—and it might not be safe for their own mental health to share everything. Please don’t compare yourself to what you see from other people on the outside. The fact is that we all get distraught, and sometimes mental illness isn’t something we want to announce over the megaphone of social media or even to the people within our own companies and social groups. I have a personal rule that I try to extend to others where helpful: No compare and despair. You are on your own journey. Make decisions that are right for you; trust yourself to know what you need.

I was once in a session with my coach Jessi, and I was lamenting some internal politics. “I can’t believe he said that!” I complained. “It was so unhelpful to the entire leadership team.” “That sounds awful,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re dealing with that. So . . . ,” she probed, “what are you doing to become resilient to this?” The question took me off guard. A person was being disrespectful. Why was the action on me?

was shocked at how much better I felt. As I mentioned earlier, your brain has a negative bias, and it takes some work to retrain ourselves to see all the good around us. Neuroscientists have found that a practice of gratitude can actually alter your brain chemistry.21 In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor discusses the Tetris Effect. That is, if you start thinking about something a lot, you begin to notice it everywhere. And applying that to a gratitude practice can allow you to see what you might be grateful for that you could otherwise miss in the day-to-day. Achor writes: “When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. The Tetris Effect teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunity wherever we look.”

In fact, research shows that belief in your own ability can be a better predictor of future success than previous job performance. In his book Self-Efficacy, Albert Bandura discusses this. Some of the great takeaways from his research are as follows: Belief in your own competence and abilities is related to self-confidence, but is not the same. He calls this self-efficacy. Self-efficacy perceptions are “a key factor in a generative system of human competence.” When we feel we have some agency in our lives, when we believe in our own competence to act on what’s within our locus of control, we thrive. Self-efficacy not only helps us be successful in endeavors, it also helps us become resilient to obstacles and failures. Believing in yourself isn’t egocentric. Being a manager is very challenging, and you can’t support everyone else without being supported as well.