Engineering Manager's Starter Kit 🎁
A gift to budding Engineering Managers to get started with engineering management
I wish someone had offered me a starter kit to get started in the world of engineering management. Here’s my present 🎁 to you - An EM’s Starter Kit. Let’s unwrap it and see what’s inside:
Your core values: Identifying core values that you strongly believe in and that matches with your personality.
Your leadership style: Defining your leadership style aligning to your core values and being more adaptable rather than following a rigid style.
Your success: What success means for you? How do you know that you’re succeeding? How to yield quick wins?
Your Manual - ‘Manual of Me’: Manual of Me is a written document detailing who you are, values you believe in, your management style and ways of working together with others.
What it takes to be a Complete Engineering Manager: Split up of Engineering Manager’s responsibilities and what it takes to be a complete engineering manager.
Your first 6 months: Detailed and actionable month-by-month plan of your first 6 months in the engineering manager role.
Here’s where it all started for me and how I transitioned into Engineering Management with a short story:
EM starter kit will help you to get up to speed and set you up towards long term success in your engineering management career.
In this edition, let’s take a look at the first aspect: your core values.
Your Core Values
You’re an EM now and wondering where to start with. There might be an ocean of responsibilities waiting for you and people are eager to meet you. Before anything, you have to associate yourself with a set of core values that you believe in. Values that are fundamental to how you work, behave, communicate and lead. Values that you live, not just talk.
Prior to me becoming an EM, my managers’ manager said to me that “I’m sure you can do justice to this role as I can see good leadership values in you”. It left me wondering what are the values that he meant and that I can really associate myself with. I went into self discovery mode and came up with the top 3 core values of mine: Integrity, Collaboration and Innovation, that I still live and fundamentals didn’t change much from that day on.
You carry your own self to work - you’re not someone else when you log into work life. Without realizing, you’ll expose your personal identity and that’s completely normal. But is it as simple as that? Especially when you become a leader of a team, there are some values that’s closer to leadership.
How can you align your authentic self with the values essential to leadership, especially in an engineering management role? - Start by understanding your personal values, Identify essential leadership values, transform and live.
Your Personal values
Start with understanding who you’re as a person and what values that you live. Do you like to be authentic? Are you hard-working? Are you humorous? - Find out your top 3 values. Below are some common personal values but not an exhaustive list:
As an individual contributor, your space was quite confined to the work that you were doing compared to that of a manager and your values would reflect that. Below are some values that you were relating with:
Individual contributor’s core values tend to be pretty hands-on and into the details as you can see above. They generally value excellence in their technical solutions, would love to solve problems and be autonomous in the work they do. Continuous learning is at the core of what they do in the middle of an ever-changing technological landscape.
Identify Leadership Values
Core values of a leader tend to be broad and related to the nature of their work where they need to be good at managing people, focusing on the bigger picture, clear communication, managing crisis and risks in project delivery, and so on and so forth.
As you can observe, you gradually move towards team and organizational aspects and your newly found core values like: empathy, collaboration, clear vision are proof of that.
Transform and Live
As you transform into a leader, you have to revisit your core values that you assumed when you were an individual contributor and assess as per the values expected from a leader. The most important part is to live your values by your behaviors and actions.
Let’s take few leadership core values and see what behaviors and actions you can adopt:
On becoming engineering manager, you will observe changes in perspectives and values that you can closely relate with:
Problem solving to Problem defining (strategic): You start to define problems and provide more context around why and what’s the impact rather than solving problems yourself.
Technical excellence to Clear vision and prioritization: Importance shifted to having clear vision and prioritization over technical excellence as you believe in balancing speed and quality. In fact, you’re realizing that speed is getting more important.
Self-orientation to Team-orientation: You’ve become more team oriented as you have to be. It’s not about you now, but rather it's them - it’s your team.
Whereas values like ownership, empathy applies for both individual contributors and engineering managers as well.
Remember that transitioning into an engineering manager is a learning process, and your values will continue to evolve as you gain experience in your new role. Remaining open to growth, feedback, and continuous improvement is key.
Now, it’s your turn. What are the top 3 leadership values that you would like to live? - List down in the below table with specific behaviors and actions.
Good, you’re all set with core values that form the basis for you as an engineering manager. Up next, we’re onto defining your leadership style.
That’s all for now - Next up let’s define your leadership style!
Thank you for such a comprehensive and insightful starter kit for Engineering Managers! Your breakdown of core values and the transition from individual contributor values to leadership values is incredibly helpful.
One tip I'd like to contribute, based on personal experience, is the significance of ongoing mentorship and seeking diverse perspectives. While defining core values and leadership styles is pivotal, having mentors from various backgrounds or industries can offer invaluable insights. They can provide guidance on nuanced situations, broaden perspectives, and offer alternative approaches to leadership challenges.This also helps in networking and building a strong relationship with like-minded people.