I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...
I was recently re-reading, actually, listening to Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s path. In one of the chapters, Camille talks about some questions to ask when hiring managers. One of those questions was — What is your management philosophy? This took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought of it myself. How would I have answered that? What is my management philosophy anyway? Philosophy By definition, Philosophy has several meanings The study of nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning system of thought based on or involving such study an underlying theory or set of ideas relating to a particular field of activity or to life as a whole In this question’s context, it is the third definition that we are looking for from the prospective managerial candidate. ...
Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager, you already have numerous responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad, and organization Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there. ...
There will be a time in your career where you start to think, I have been doing what I’m assigned really well. I would like to do more. Maybe this time, I should lead people. What do you think you need, in order to start working on leadership? Attend a leadership course? Read a book? That is a good start. Wouldn’t it be great if there was one place where you could go to find out what you needed to become a good leader? ...
Featured Image by Austin Distel on Unsplash The title of this post is a bit vague. I agree it doesn’t give away much. Having managed teams since 2015ish, I have finally come to realise that as managers, one must make sure that their team members have an environment to thrive. A place where they can grow, be stretched just enough to feel proud of their achievement and not too much where they feel, work is taking over their life. It is not just about getting something done or achieving a target, but it is more about how you get there in a way that your team is committed to it rather than forced to it. ...
The opportunity You are at the peak of your software engineering career. Or at least that’s what you thought at the time. You have done it all. New development, maintaining legacy applications, refactoring code, performance improvements, different kinds of database technologies, from proprietary to mainstream distributed systems. You have even tried your hand at web development and improved web app load times, things that as a backend engineer you never knew about! You are about to wonder what next to get yourself to the solutions architect or a software architect role. Then suddenly out of nowhere comes an opportunity to take on a managerial role. ...