Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

the higher your position, the more you scale yourself to help others.

At their root, 1:1s should reduce uncertainty by making both parties feel more connected to the rest of the team while clarifying intent.

“Your 1:1s are the most important thing you do.

Because 1:1s are critical, they should not be the kind of meeting anyone takes lightly, either on the management or employee side. The meetings should have a regular cadence, scheduled either once a week or biweekly and only canceled for pressing circumstances. And if they have to be canceled, it’s a good practice to let the other person know why rather than simply removing it from the calendar.

1s help make up for sporadic contact by meeting regularly.

One-on-ones should be conducted in a space with the smallest amount of distractions possible.

The whole purpose of the 1:1 should be to make the other person feel valuable and connected.

As mentioned, 1:1s provide a great opportunity for a manager to reduce uncertainty and provide clarity. Some ways to do that are as follows:

Prioritize. If there’s too much work, spend time talking through the most important pieces, and even perhaps offer yourself as a shield from some of the work.

Make action items. Sometimes a task is too large, and the employee needs help breaking it down into organized pieces. This makes it easier to know where to start on a task and how to move forward.

Clarify vision. People might feel overwhelmed because they don’t know why they’re doing something. If you can communicate the necessity of the work at hand, then the employee can align with the goal of the project and the work can start to feel more rewarding and valuable.

“People leave managers, not jobs.”

the manager’s job in a 1:1 is to provide a space for the employee to speak clearly and freely about concerns, particularly ones that might impact their performance.

It can be helpful to address the listening mode transparently. I say to people, “I am a ‘fix it’ person and will default to trying to fix your problems. If you want to vent, that’s absolutely fine by me. But you may have to let me know that’s what you want, because otherwise I will try to problem solve, and that can be frustrating. Just tell me what you need.”

Even though 1:1s have a tendency to be informal, because everyone already knows each other, they are way more successful when there’s an agenda.

You spend many waking hours at work. It’s important that your working relationships, particularly between manager and employee, are healthy and that you’re intentionally checking in with purpose, both in the short-term and the long-term.

As a manager, having a team of employees who feel valued, aligned, and connected is about the best thing you can ask for. So value them, because you’ll get solid value in return.

Alignment with the Why In the scenario I just described, part of the problem was that I didn’t align anyone with the why (the purpose) of the task. It’s pretty easy to forget, or not prioritize, doing something if you have no clue why you’re doing it. Repeat yourself and align the group with the importance of the task, and you’ll likely have a better result. If you can properly address the mission, the goal, the reason behind something, you will find a lot of passionate engineers will follow you to the end state of the journey.

repetition becomes an important tool to make things stick. The trick is to convey the same message, but in different ways. Think of all the methods we have to communicate these days: chats, emails, video meetings, texts, document comments, and so much more. Because some people communicate better in one medium than another, using all of these platforms becomes a strategy for repetition without nagging.

The single most important thing we can do to write better documents and give better speeches is to write them first, and then reread them from the audience’s perspective.

There is no single way to lead a team. Spend some time thinking through the kind of leader you want to be, and take action. Think through what values you want to uphold on a team and lead by example.

People are looking for different amounts of transparency from you as a leader, and it’s okay to ask them how much depth they want as well. Sometimes I’m surprised by the answer. A note of caution: Some things that may look like transparency are actually toxic. Think gossip, manipulation, and unproductive venting that pits one person or group against another. This may seem obvious, but it can be hard to reflect in the moment.

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.

One of the hardest challenges we have as managers is to guide groups of people through change. When managed poorly, change can leave folks feeling like the ground beneath them is shifting and they have no path to success. However, when managed well, change can be the most pivotal force of transformation for good.

The real problem is people. People weren’t aligned. People weren’t supported. People weren’t bought in. In order to make transformation, the culture has to shift to allow for it. This is why culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In order to make real change, we need to connect people to the why.

Support people to grow the skills they need in order to succeed.

Whatever team you’re working with has developed a skill set to be successful in the current organization. If you’re asking them to evolve, you need to plan for that growth and make room for them to develop new skills to succeed.

Organizational changes that involve reporting structures tend to work best when the planning is up front as much as possible, and then the change happens fast. Being told you’ll have a new manager and then not getting one for months is confusing and stressful, aligned or not.

If the decision-making process is completely opaque, sometimes people feel like there’s something you’re hiding or that there is underlying malice in the decisions being made.

Respect the back channel. If it’s on fire, something wasn’t communicated well.

I’ve seen feedback turn an unhappy, low performer into a happy, high performer, and I’ve also seen it ruin relationships when done poorly.

treat all feedback exchanges, as much as possible, as though they are a partnership.

When our brain perceives a threat, our amygdala is hijacked in order to avoid that threat, leading to reduced analytical thinking, creative insight, and problem-solving. Giving feedback the wrong way can send the receiver into a threat response, where they can’t properly internalize or respond to the feedback you’re giving them.”

In essence, to give good feedback that actually helps an individual or team grow, it’s pertinent that they don’t feel threatened and feel that it’s coming from a place of care.

Ask your team members how they prefer to get feedback, and listen to the answer. The more they are in tune with their own state of mind, the better they think critically and communicate.

Point out positive growth on the team and give accolades for it in public. By doing this, folks will know you really mean it when you say you want them to learn and improve.

On the other side of the spectrum, don’t ever expose someone’s growth in a way that belittles them. Don’t tolerate this or any kind of bullying from your team member...

As a leader, we’d like our teams’ decision-making to be driven by love rather than fear—not just for hippie reasons. As mentioned before, fear-based decisions tend not to be the most logical. I’ve seen fear-based decisions result in very poor business outcomes indeed.

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.

Try your best to give feedback when people are in as good a mental state as possible, but also as soon as possible.

Feedback is a tool and can be weaponized for our own insecurities and blind spots if we’re not thinking things through.

We tend to like people more if they are like us6

It can be disheartening and even embarrassing to find out in a performance review six months after an event occurred that you should have been doing something differently.

Feedback is more helpful if you can really nail down what exactly could have been improved and why.

Not to be harsh, but if you don’t know the answer to this, the feedback is probably unnecessary.

After you’ve delivered the feedback, give guidance for the future. Without guidance, people may feel like they’re left on their own to navigate the problem.

Ideally the feedback we give is in service to the person: It’s necessary, it’s thoughtful, and it helps them improve at work. I like to think through whether the feedback would serve them anywhere: Is this something they will be able to carry in their careers? Will this help them level up? Is this something that will help them even if they were in a different job?

it’s much easier to hijack a person’s amygdala and put them into a fight or flight state if they feel judged. This can happen when giving feedback. Now imagine this scenario in a public setting, versus delivering the feedback in a 1:1. Not only can that feel bad for the individual, but it can have negative impacts on other team dynamics, creating a culture where people don’t feel safe around one another. Feeling safe in a team environment is important because psychological safety in general tends to help people feel happier and more productive.

Did a whole project go off the rails with an entire group of people? What’s the common denominator there? Hint: It’s you.