What Manager of Managers care (and less) about
Strengthening relationship further with your manager
In the first part of working with your manager, we’ve seen about their world, what are their success and worry, building trust with them and aligning on expectations for each other.
In this part, we’ll see what they care and less about, so that you understand their priorities and by proactively taking ownership on sorting out your worries and keeping them in the loop.
Without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
All They Care About
As an engineering manager, understanding what your manager cares more about is crucial to align your success with theirs, leading you to establish a successful working relationship with them.
Here are some of the aspects that manager of managers care more about:
Outcome: Value that their teams are delivering. If you ask them to pick one thing that they care the most, “outcome” will easily end up top in the list. Make sure you’re delivering value from the initiatives that your team is prioritizing and working on.
Strategy Alignment: Your team’s strategy is aligned with overall domain or organization strategy.
Progress & Reporting: How your team is progressing on goals set and how it’s being reported?
Collaboration: How your team collaborates with other engineering and non-engineering teams in the organization. Are there any silos between teams? Whether the goals are aligned? Are they enabling or blocking each other? are some important questions that your manager really cares about.
Your team’s adaptability: As in the ever-changing landscape, your team should be capable of adjusting to the change in priorities and scope.
Budget Planning: They do budget planning for people they need in their engineering teams (including yours) in the short and long term, cost involved in operating the infrastructure, build vs buy decision are all some important aspects that your manager cares about.
Culture & Environment: It’s all about how your team fits into the overarching culture and environment that you’re in. It’s also bringing your perspective to the table as your manager will welcome any suggestion that you have to improve overall culture.
All They Care “Less” About
While your manager is there to support you, there are certain aspects they care less about, allowing you to lead your team autonomously and effectively. In other words, they won’t worry about everything that’s concerning you and your team. That’s why you’re there as an Engineering Manager. To a certain degree, it’s your team and your worry, until it gets bigger that impacts the organization or more challenging for you to resolve.
It’s not to take on a negative connotation that your manager is caring less about you and your team but it’s the trust that they have in you to do the job, autonomy that you deserve, practicality of them being a manager of managers and bigger problems for them to solve for organization.
Here are some of the aspects that your manager cares less about:
Your team’s processes: They care less about how you estimate, whether you’re using agile or kanban, how you do code reviews or any of your team’s processes unless they themself is an enthusiast of a specific process. They care about the outcome rather than getting into the details of “how”.
Every individual’s performance details unless: Performance details of each and every individual that you’re managing doesn’t need the direct attention of your manager. Occasionally you can share how each of them are doing overall or can talk about a specific case that your manager might be interested about or if you need their feedback on. But not every detail that you observe, especially if there are discussions in progress with individuals, it’s recommended not to overshare with your manager. You need to involve your manager only if it's decisive, e.g. having an individual in a formal Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or discussing a possible promotion of your direct report.
Detailed technical aspects: Detailed technical aspects like management of technical debt, architecture patterns and best practices will not worry your manager a lot until it turns into a strategic initiative that the whole domain or the organization might care about. You’re accountable for technical decisions that your team is making and your manager might worry only about how that could affect behavior of the product and impact to business if any.
Planning capacity and resource allocation: Allocating engineers to the projects and planning team’s capacity for a quarter or two is on your shoulders and you may find your manager less interested about it in your 1-1s or any interaction you have with them. Do you need more people in your team? - well, that can increase their curiosity a bit. Their response will be like “now, tell me more about it”.
Day to day operations: Day to day operations of your team are not their epicenter. You decide how your team should operate on a day to day basis like change in day to day priorities, resolving a technical incident, software releases and regular deployments.
Team internal communication: It’s up to you to define your team’s communication patterns and preferences that works best for them. How they touch base with each other, with other teams and stakeholders are solely up to you.
You may find your manager more involved in some of the above aspects depending on the need, your ability as an Engineering Manager to manage on your own, their leadership style or some of them might be just curious to be part of it. If you’re a new Engineering Manager, you may find your manager more involved to help you from the sideline or to share feedback on how you’re doing your job. Whereas as an experienced engineering manager and one who worked closely with your manager over some time, you will have more autonomy.
It’s wise to discuss ways of working and what they care more about the most at the earliest so that you can avoid any misunderstanding that may arise in the future.
Help Your Boss Help You
Your manager is there to help you - whenever you need it. But they may not have a secret power to know when you might need help. It’s on you to raise your hand and ask for it. You might be burned out or you’re in need of more resources for your team or you need to gain more product and business context to do prioritization right or need a helping hand to resolve a critical conflict in your team. With well established trust and rapport with your manager, asking for help isn’t a second thought.
Encourage skip 1-1s: It’s an opportunity for your manager to get a pulse of what's happening in the team by directly speaking to your direct reports. Through skip 1-1s, your manager shall give you a different perspective of the dysfunctions in the team, what’s working well or not, and feedback about you. This could greatly help you perform your role as a manager.
Ask context for prioritization: Your manager is the right person to ask for business context and goals to prioritize initiatives for your team.
Channelize 360° feedback: Request your manager to channelize feedback from everyone you’re working closely with.
Working in pairs: Some managers would be open to pair with you for whatever reasons that you would like to. Once, my manager paired with me to do a mock exit interview as we did a role play and he acted as an underperformer to let out emotions and see how I would handle that in the real conversation with the individual. It greatly helped me in carrying out my job as an engineering manager better.
Help Your Boss
Now it’s your turn to help your manager.
You might ask, “Are you sure that I can help my manager?” - yes, I’m sure. Every Manager of Managers needs help. It’s a matter of asking them what their biggest pain points are, where they are overloaded with and where they lack visibility into your team’s work.
You help your boss to:
Succeed: Your success is part of their success. Helping them to succeed doesn’t only make them look nicer but also foster a trusted relationship with you.
See your team’s accomplishments: Not every senior manager gets to see their team’s accomplishments often as they should be. You can showcase the success of your team on a regular basis about what has been achieved, who went the extra mile and what impact has been delivered.
Delegate to you: Ask them where they are overloaded with and if you can provide your support. It could be defining and setting up delivery metrics or representing external client meetings on behalf of them. Look for opportunities that you can take something out of your manager’s plate
Improve by providing feedback: As like you, your manager depends on your feedback on how they are setting strategic direction.
Having the helping attitude is equal to saying to your manager, “I got your back. We’re in this together”.
That’s it for now - Up next, I’ll be writing about how to handle conflicts with your manager and challenge them mindfully.
What’s your experience working with your manager? What do they care more and less about? - Let me know your thoughts in the comments.