3 EM Perspective changes

2021 has been an incredible year in terms of learnings both personal and professional front. I stepped into EM role during earlier part of year. Over course of year I had to unlearn somethings and learn a lot. Its been fun, frustrating and rewarding. There are lot of things that I learned over course of year, but here are my top3 perspective changes I can think of.

• “A players hire A players” is an oft quoted thing. But for me even more important thing is “A players make A players”, what I meant by that is while top engineers might or might not attract another top talent but a good team player is your ally. You can use them to turn around performance of your B and C if they be willing. While I got incredibly lucky to get a very good team to boot off, what I learnt was if there is a thing you shouldn’t be taking shortcuts with it is investing and hiring the right people onto them team.
• With all my recent experiences as engineer during my initial part of EM I have overindexed on autonomy than structure. One thing I appreciated as engineer from my EM’s was giving autonomy. This definitely works very well for your high performers and senior engineers on team, this might end up leaving early career engineers with confusion at times. They might need some structure to be able to navigate different things while they are learning ropes of the trade. I will be very intentional with how I spend and create this guard rails for early career engineers going forward.
• 1:1’s don’t have to be boring. At times as engineer I used to be worried about going into 1:1’s and wondering if I am not making full use of it. By nature of it they are very unstructured and different people extract varying degree of output from these meetings. As a manager though, 1:1’s are super valuable tool. Overtime I learnt to add structure to it, listen more intently and started using it as two way tool to keep everyone on team on equal footing. Having said that some people make 1:1’s about them and other’s about team. While it is altrustic of them in later case, it might(not necessarily will) work against their progress. As a manager its a good challenge for me to try and make sure people are not punsihed for that. One easier hack I found was adding structure around recommended topics and labelling some 1:1’s specifically towards career progression discussion. At the end we should balance freeform and strucuture.

One last thing, as a software engineer you will get allies to improve your trade naturally be it as teammates or other engineers from different part of organization who you share common pains and pleasures. As a manager having a strong support community helps both with your personal progression and making sure you are working on most impactful things all the time.