Are you an Engineer transitioning to Leadership role? Read this
Some reflections from my trials and errors so you can orient yourself from day 0.
None of these come from AI generated rubbish. Grab your coffee and your engineer hat and read on.
I was an analytic engineering lead for 2.5 years. I first embarked on the journey with certain expectations, and grew a lot during this time (shoutout to my ex-podmates who were subject to my trials and errors). What prompts me to write this post is a recent read on medium about leadership. I thought it would be great to elaborate some more especially for the engineer - leadership transition.
I’d encourage you to read that first because the points below are extensions, not replacements. And I hope this would give you some orientation, should you be considering transitioning to leadership role.
#1: Get used to taking a step back
and let others do things, discover things, make their own mistakes, learn by their own pace.
This was one of the hardest things for me to adjust to. As an engineer, I was pretty happy with doing the work and navigating the unknown by myself, so much so that it would become natural to be on (technical) problem-solving mode all the time and I felt bored when there was few to no technical problems to solve. It took me perhaps a whole year to adjust to the idea that I’m not supposed to do it myself anymore. Rather, what is expected of the lead is to only give advice or guidance when it’s “time”, while taking a backseat to the tinkering and give rooms for others to do it. I had to turn off my technical problem-solving hungry brain and turn on the human problem-solving part, which is infinitely more dynamic and challenging.
The art of deciding when it’s “time” is also another thing to learn, and it will vary from individual.
I’m absolutely not perfect and made plenty of mistakes, at times I made the mistake of intervening too early or harshly, leading to demotivation of team member, at other times a bit too hands-off, leading to similar result. Frequent communication and emotion reading is key. It’s a hard balance to strike, as you have to walk the line between project result vs people empowerment.
Many articles about leadership out there, as a result, emphasize that before you step into this role you should ask yourself if you find joy in seeing others grow. To be honest I have a mixed answer here and perhaps you would feel the same. I surely am happy to see others grow, but I also have a hard time turning off my engineering hat and felt somewhat left behind if I cannot tinker something myself, which diminishes my joys. A tricky thing to do for new engineer leads is to find that balance, where you can find time for your own technical growth, while not abandoning your main mission: your team.
#2: Explain, honestly & consistently
This might be a challenge for people who are not too used to explaining things for others. In typical corporate context, explaining is often expected from lower-level staff to the higher ranks1. But in most tech companies, a more flattening/democratic spirit is adopted, where we are often expected to explain things to each others. Engineers explain things to help other engineers replicate a process, to discuss pros and cons, and to adjust & scale.
During engineer interviews, I had often seen this challenge manifest. The requirement was for the candidates to narrate himself/herself solving a technical question, however the reality was perhaps only 1/5 people did this, if not less.
Whether it was a matter of ability, or shyness, or something else, doesn’t matter. When you are an engineer the communication skill (manifest as explaining things) is critical to get buy-in from your fellow engineers and your stakeholders. When you are a lead the explaining you have to do has as much importance. No you cannot just bulldoze your way using a title. It’s not how it works.
You need to explain to your team critical decisions by management (to do that of course you must be convinced yourself of what you are about to say, which depends on your management’s explaining to you! Full circle)
You need to explain to management your rationales or your team’s achievements/ effort, because you are the only one with most technical understanding of their feats (or fails). Without this, you would fail to advocate for your team and prevent them from getting their rightful recognitions.
You need to explain technical solutions, (not do it yourself), to encourage your members to solve it themselves. Sometimes, the explaining happens repeatedly. You would need patience.
In all of these explaining, you absolutely must be consistent. The only way you can be consistent is being honest.
#3: Admit mistakes and failures
This doesn’t sound very motivating. One of the many things a lead has to do is also to motivate their team, in all situations. How can admitting mistakes and failures be a part of this?
I’m not an advocate for toxic positivity. I adopt this philosophy for myself because of my corporate time (a different company) being an employee under a somewhat roller-coaster leadership. I realized that throughout the whole process of being subject to that ride, I craved more than anything frankness and honesty from my managers. Their perpetual delusion of painting everything as rainbow was bordering gaslighting techniques that even until now I still have to question reality at times.
Once you have established frequent, honest communication with your team, it’s not that difficult to admit where things went wrong2. This is why in engineering practice we have retrospectives. You should also admit personal mistakes during 1-1 with your team, or if it’s a team-level shenanigan you committed, admit it with them too. It builds trust, helps everyone grow in the process, and encourage your team to do the same.
From the perspective of team members, I would be able to see that hey, my lead/manager can make mistakes too, and they own it, not blaming it on anyone, or gaslight everyone into thinking it’s not a mistake. It creates a healthy environment to work in. So that next time I make mistakes, I’d own it too and wouldn’t be afraid of admitting it with my lead.
#4: Get used to these challenges
Challenge 1: loneliness
So in the article I shared, the first thing mentioned is that leadership is a thankless job. It’s true. I mean if you are lucky you get to hear your members expressing their thoughts with you, and that’s heart-warming if you get to experience it. But you should also know most days it feels thankless, and lonely, especially when you have to make some hard decisions. So prepare for that. If you are under impression that being a lead brings you popularity or some sense of being appreciated, readjust your mindset, now.
(and you shouldn’t set those as goals either)
Challenge 2: Pushback & getting pushback
You should also prepare yourself for the ability to push back. I recall reading some other good piece about being mid-level manager requires you to manage “up”. Most team leads are often conditioned to think they only need to lead their team (i.e manage “down”3). While that is true, you would soon learn that you have to manage up as well, out of necessity.
What does manage up mean in practice? I’m no expert (and there are plenty helpful articles out there to help you navigate this), but I definitely can relate to situations where you are required to explain/ defend a certain position. I can also recall being the victim of poor middle-management, whose failure to push back led to our workload creeping over another department’s job - and frankly that’s my own failure to push back too, where I could have asked “Why are we doing another department’s job?”. It’s impossible to have agreement all the time, and pushing back is a skill I think everyone needs to learn regardless of their position, not just leaders.
Another relevant skill, is also handling pushback. It’s normal and healthy to be on the receiving end of this. If you work in a company where there is no pushback, expect that company to be flooded with yay-sayers and grifters.
Pushbacks from your team can show up in many forms, it doesn’t mean a negative energy directed at you. It can just be questions, sometimes it can be indirect and a bit subtle. You need to learn to distant yourself from judgement and emotions and to evaluate things on its merit and validity. It’s almost a paradox, you build stronger, healthier human relationship by detaching from a bit of (reactive) human emotions. Once you do this enough of time, everyone would adopt similar perspective when challenging each other. It would be a great thing to see everyone adopt healthy confrontation and work toward something.
Challenge 3: You don’t know if you have done right
…until long long after (if at all)
In solving technical problems, you validate results easily and can confirm if your solution is wrong or right immediately, this hardwires our brains into expecting the same in solving human problems when being a lead.
Unfortunately in leading, there is little clue to knowing if you have done something right, until months or years later. If you have a hard time adjusting to this reality, you will find leading unfulfilling and somewhat demotivating because you cannot “validate” the solution immediately. The only feedbacks you have is communication from your team, if they choose to open up, so it’s important to listen and ask for feedbacks (and the whole practice of building trust & psychological safety in your team).
#5: Be clear about your role & path
When you take on a leadership role, it’s not really a promotion. Yes you surely have a pay upgrade and such, which is great. But it’s important to remember it’s a whole different path that requires you to adjust yourself mentally and professionally. You are now leaving the engineering path behind. You must now adopt some shift in mindset, and expect to lose some of those engineering virtues that got you here.
This is something you must be absolutely clear about. And here are some things to expect:
Your time distribution on tech work vs the-long-list-of-things a lead do is probably written somewhere as 30-70, but reality will be different.
Once you lead (this also varies depends on your role being tech lead or some other types), you would spend more time thinking about project management, delivery, orchestrating things together, managing expectations of stakeholders, balancing resources, finding out what’s wrong with that specific member who is showing signs of withdrawal, checking up on teams’ well-being and engagement, recruiting and interviewing, evaluating tough candidates, determining if it’s worth investing more time and effort on a project/ individual, drafting up emails and presentations, managing up, etc. than you would about some technical solutions. That mental occupation is not 5 days a week, it would likely creep a bit into your daily thoughts, depends on how good you are at compartmentalization. Throughout my time being engineer vs lead, I learn that technical problems - even tough one - can occupy my sleep, but once I’ve solved them the obsession is gone; but human puzzles can last long beyond the events. You eventually have to learn to be a bit tougher in your decision-making process & mindset, or you would find it very draining.
Do not expect to be your team’s friend, and especially if you are one of those people-pleasers, I think being a lead would teach you to get rid of that mentality, one way or another. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be or cannot be friendly / warm with your teammates. You absolutely should! But your expectation should not be to make everyone happy and pleased with you, aka try to be liked/popular, as it can become unhealthy attachment that affect your function. Your role as a lead requires some amount of challenging your teammates so they can grow. And you will backtrack your own effort by trying to be liked.
There will be times of uncertainty, which your team will rely on you for clarity and motivation. And even if you yourself feel uncertain and unmotivated, you should still try to provide clarity and safety for your team, as much as humanly possible.
#6: Accept that people come and go
During my trials and errors I did experience a fair share of onboarding and saying goodbyes. Not sure what this says about my retention rate haha. Every onboarding was a repeated process of all the ups and downs of learning about someone new again, adapting to their preferences and integrating them to the team, learning the strengths and weaknesses to balance them with different projects, encourage them to take some risks, and growing trust. At some point if you are lucky some of your more senior teammates can be the great buddy/mentor in your place for the new member, but that too would take a while to achieve.
You would need to learn to not take it personally when your teammate leaves, though it may feel so a bit, especially when you have invested quite a lot of time and effort with them in different stages of growth, which grew a human bond. Your effort may have been a bit one-sided, or it may have been mutual, either way, you have to learn to say goodbye and wishing them well too. It can feel hard if you are a bit attached to people you work with, and when the effort of finding a new member and training is high. But as with anything else, being a lead requires you to grow some resilience and be less reactive.
#7: Being healthy … and unimportant
You need to be healthy
Ok I think this sounds a bit obvious? But maybe it needs to be stated. If you yourself are a lead or manager or any role of responsibility (for others), you need to be healthy. Not just physically but mentally. If you are not really there, you cannot motivate anyone else, and your decision making is negatively impacted. This brings me to the next super important point.
Learn to ask for help
If you are one of those people that have a hard time asking for help, this does not come naturally. But when you are a lead this is a skill. You should learn to differentiate between things you can do alone, things you should delegate, and things that you should ask for support (from your own lead/manager). Failing to ask for help and you would be at risk of burning out, emotionally exhausted, and you would find it hard to fulfill your role every day. I don’t really have a fast rule here other than know yourself: your weakness, and strength, and strategically plan for complementary skills and support system from your team and your manager.
I too wish people can read my minds at times so I don’t have to say out loud things that I think is obvious but, unfortunately, what we think is never obvious and we must learn to communicate it.
Being unimportant
Leaders come and go too.
The moment you think of yourself as being important, you are at risk of diminishing the space for growth of others on your team (and also burning yourself out by taking on too much). Try to adopt an “I’m not important and very much replaceable” mindset, it helps greatly with your mental health, setting boundaries (take some breaks), and also your own reflections on your role as a lead. At some point, your team should be a-ok & functional without you. That should be your goal.
Lastly
As somebody said somewhere:
Being a lead makes you a better engineer, and being an engineer makes you a better lead
I agree with this and would encourage you to take on that role after the ‘orientation’ above. Of course there are some questions about permanent role change, which is worth noodling over, and discussing with your manager. Clarity of expectations and being truthful with yourself is key.
Urgh.
And don’t forget to mention where things went right too! It’s important!
I’m using the term manage “up” and “down” as they are commonly known terms but also reflective of the hierarchical thinking that plagues the corporate world, which I … despise. Hierarchy does exist and is necessary, but I do not like the ‘hierarchical thinking’ - which translates to cowardice and idiotic decision making process. “CEO said so, so you do it”. “I didn’t decide this, CxO did”.