Thoughts on managing engineering teams(minaandrawos.com)
minaandrawos.com
Thoughts on managing engineering teams
https://www.minaandrawos.com/2021/06/16/managing-engineering-teams/
6 comments
[deleted]
Yes, and yes. Managers believing their teams are them is a magnet for megalomaniacs. My best managers have always been hands off just helping me drive my goals where they can.
These are great to keep in mind. I love hear their thoughts on how to get to know peoples motivations in the online-remote work setting (except just asking- because they are right, because they sometimes don’t know what motivates them) Then, How to change our management style appropriately.
I think for me vision, strategy should be flexible. I’m in the startup R&D scene and things change quickly. We also say general thing like be the best at X. Strategy is nimble and flexible, some mistakes I made at the start was to drive certain things until they are done. This worked well for me on the first two projects, but I’ve been grinding this one project for too long. That’s my bad because I was to passionately driving it among my team. We now are on nearly a year and results are not there. We are cutting it down now. But I think we should have reevaluate it maybe 3 months sooner.
I think for me vision, strategy should be flexible. I’m in the startup R&D scene and things change quickly. We also say general thing like be the best at X. Strategy is nimble and flexible, some mistakes I made at the start was to drive certain things until they are done. This worked well for me on the first two projects, but I’ve been grinding this one project for too long. That’s my bad because I was to passionately driving it among my team. We now are on nearly a year and results are not there. We are cutting it down now. But I think we should have reevaluate it maybe 3 months sooner.
On mobile there is a pretty massive white space gutter on the right and left of the text. This makes the article challenging to read.
Not for those of us who code with 20 char line limits
Not sure about this at all. I'm more attracted to the model where the "manager" is a hands-off character that finds and communicates information/resources on behalf of the team. Parallel to that, there might be another "coach" character tasked with helping the team be more effective. Both of these have limited influence on the careers of team members.
What must be avoided is to trigger managers' narcissism such that they start to believe that the output of the team is their work, and the members of the team are "appendices" of them. Separating roles/responsibilities, changing job titles, and so on might help with this.
Avoid using promotion-to-power as a reward, because it attracts the wrong people. Rather, find ways to reward people that influence positively without power.