“Everyone is living in their own world which is part of someone else's world”.
Wow, I never thought I would come up with such a reflective phrase. But it’s true in a way.
Let me explain.
Your world as an Engineering Manager consists of worlds of your direct reports, your success and worry. Cross functional experts like product, design and data are part of your world too as you work together as one team closely on a day-to-day basis.
Rarely can a team deliver value on their own without coordinating with peer teams within the same domain or a business unit - they play a part too in your world. However the coordination has been considerably reduced over the past decade as teams tend to be autonomous at the same time supporting each other to work towards the bigger picture.
Your Success is success to your business delivered through your team along with the success of your people. Read more here about what defines your success:
Your Worry
Your worries could be the ones that are blockers to attain your (and your team’s) success:
Team Performance Concerns: Worries about the overall performance of your engineering team, such as productivity issues, quality concerns, or missed deadlines, can impede success.
Communication Challenges: Worries related to ineffective communication within the team and with stakeholders can hinder success.
Scope Creep and Changing Requirements: Concerns about scope creep or frequent changes in project requirements can be challenging.
Prioritization Challenges: Struggles with prioritizing tasks and projects effectively can lead to delays in delivering high-priority features or addressing critical issues.
Having clarity on your success and worry can help take ownership and discuss solutions, not just bring only problems to your manager.
Your Manager’s World
Depending on the size of your organization, your manager can be anyone ranging from CTO to Senior engineering Manager. If you’re an Engineering Manager of the only team in a startup, your manager will be a CEO or a CTO (if your startup can afford one) who looks after the entire engineering department so to speak.
If you’re part of a medium to large sized organization, your manager will be someone titled head of engineering or director of engineering or a senior engineering manager and they might be looking after multiple engineering teams in a domain - which is a slice of business that have its own priorities, goals and strategy, contributing to the organization itself.
To work better with your manager, you have to understand their world better and how it’s interconnected with yours and other teams they manage.
If you take a closer look at your manager’s world, your world is compressed into theirs, plus the worlds of other managers they manage. They make sure all the worlds of managers within their world don't collide but work in harmony as oneness to contribute to the bigger picture, which is for the organization’s success. Besides that they work with their peers in the likes of senior leadership from product, design, data and business stakeholders but on a strategic level.
Zooming out further, your manager’s world is part of the organization's world where executives, senior most leadership and big clients are part of it. Here is where you can find other functions like finance, people team and other domains as well.
Their Success
Your manager’s success is nothing but success of all the teams they manage, through which ultimately delivering success to the organization. Success of every team should be aligned with your manager’s - you should ensure that’s true from your team’s perspective as well.
Their Worry
Same as success, worries of all their teams are theirs but - there’s a big but. If your worries are genuine and that can’t be resolved by yourselves as an Engineering Manager as it is outside your team’s context and responsibilities, you should report to your manager. It can be organization structural concerns, frequently changing priorities from the leadership and business, lack of people in your team to achieve team goals.
If your worries are an individual's performance issues, misalignment of your team’s priorities to overall strategy, lack of collaboration with sister teams, lack of skills within your team are all should be your own worries that you should try to resolve. If you can’t resolve it yourselves, you can ask for your manager’s help but you should be mindful when you do that.
Imagine your manager has two buckets: success bucket and worry bucket. Your success can be filled into their success’s bucket and they will absolutely appreciate that. Filling their worry bucket with yours and other Engineering Managers start to fill up as well, they will be soon overwhelmed.
Be mindful of what bucket of your manager’s that you’re filling in. Success bucket or worry bucket?
Building Trust
To establish trust and rapport with your manager, you have to start building it from scratch. Your credibility is your identity. Proving that you can lead your team to success by delivering value, not once, twice, thrice but reliably over and over again. It definitely takes time that it deserves. Probably a few months or even up to a quarter or two.
What can you do to build trust with your manager?
Consistency: Consistency in what you say, what you deliver and how you act. Be deliberate about commitments that you make with them and transparent if you can’t take up any unrealistic expectations for you and for your team. Under promise and over deliver can work well.
Taking ownership: Stay accountable for the team's results. When things don't go as planned, admit any errors, discuss lessons learned, and outline corrective actions. Demonstrating accountability builds trust and credibility.
Keep your manager informed about the team's progress, achievements, and challenges. Regular updates create transparency and build confidence in your ability to manage the team effectively. Don't shy away from discussing challenges or roadblocks. Being transparent about difficulties demonstrates honesty and allows for collaborative problem-solving.
Building trust is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort and a commitment to open communication and collaboration. By demonstrating reliability, competence, and a proactive approach to problem-solving, you contribute to a trusting and effective working relationship with your manager.
Aligning on expectations
Every Manager is different.
You are different. I am different. My manager is different. Your manager will be different. And obviously their view on expectations differ, highly influenced by the organizational needs and their leadership style. My very first manager expected me to take up managerial responsibilities up to 70% and be hands-on for 30%. I had a different opinion on it and expressed that I want to be 50-50 with the split. He agreed to it and took over part of the managerial responsibilities on his own, which I got back gradually in a few months to a year.
Aligning expectations for each other is important right from the start. From your manager’s point of view, they will express what you can expect from them and what they expect from you. From your point of view, you express what your manager can expect from you and what you expect from your manager. I call it a “cross expectation matrix”.
Assuming I’m your manager and you’re one of the engineering managers that I’m managing, let’s see how a cross expectation matrix could look like:
Once the cross expectation matrix is mapped, discuss commonalities and differences. Make a note of commonalities which is a green signal for you to move ahead and continue working towards it. With differences in expectations, discuss each other’s point of view and decide on what works best for both of you and the organization as a whole.
How is your cross expectation matrix looking like with your manager? Have you done such an activity before? - trust me it’s totally worth it. Revisit the expectations matrix whenever there’s a change in dynamics, style of working with your manager.
That’s it for now - Up next, I’ll be writing about what manager of managers care (and less) about, how do you handle difficult conversations if things aren’t working out with your boss.
What’s your experience working with your manager? - Let me know your thoughts in the comments.