Being a Manager

My job as a manager is about doing what I can to make the people and the organization successful. I am doing what I can to support great impact and building a great place to work. I have impact by applying my leadership to help drive things forward.

I have iterated a bit on how to describe the work we do as managers in engineering so if you already have read my post on “the work we do as managers” this post might be a bit repetitive.

Sometimes I get questions about what being a manager is all about; what are the responsibilities and what are managers actually doing. I like to look at management from three perspectives:

• The areas of responsibilities we act within
• The things we do and the tools we use
• The kind of leadership we apply to have impact

Posts about being a manager can be found under the Being a manager category.

The four areas of responsibilities

Regardless of this you will always have to try and influence things in all of these areas if the impact of your direct reports are dependent of this. As a manager you are responsible for the performance of the people that reports to you. In practice this means that you need to do whatever it takes to enable their performance. In the end, they are (obviously) the ones that will deliver the impact needed, but you will have to do everything you can to make sure that they have what they need to do a good job.

I describe the engineering leadership needed for successful individuals and teams in four categories:

• People and Teams. The leadership we provide to support impact and growth of individuals and teams.
• Business and Technology. The leadership we provide to make sure we take the right decisions and have what we need to deliver the right impact now and in the future.
• Building Culture. The leadership we provide to build a great culture and create a great place to work.
• Manager stuff. The leadership that comes with being a formal people manager, staffing and hiring and being a great employer.

Depending on your role and the setup in the organization you are working on the accountability for a certain area might be different. You might be the single person accountable for one area, you might share the responsibility with someone else for another area and lack formal powers for a third area.

To be successful as a manager you need to be good at:

• Identifying problems or opportunities within the different areas
• Understanding the impact of these problems and opportunities
• Efficiently prioritize the most important ones

There will always be more things you would like to take action on than you have time for, why prioritization is an important manager skill. Your ability to quickly assess the opportunities and understand the impact, take the priority decisions and also put other things aside will be important for your ability to become successful.

People and Teams

The leadership we provide to support impact and growth of individuals and teams.

This is about supporting the individuals that reports to us and the teams they are working in. Helping them remove problems and support their growth. We also need to be good at helping people understand their motivational drivers since people that enjoy their work deliver better results. Supporting teams includes ensuring good collaboration in the team and making sure we continuously improve our speed and delivery. Also includes helping out when needed to resolve blockers or fostering cross-team collaboration.

Some manager roles put more focus in this area than others but regardless of this, every manager needs to make sure that the team is functioning well since their direct reports will not be able to perform great in a bad team context.

Besides great team collaboration you will need good ways of working to support great delivery. As managers we might need to step in from time to time to help the team define their processes, increase their ability to plan work or increase their ability to know their own speed and capacity.

Business and Technology

The leadership we provide to make sure we take the right decisions and have what we need to deliver the right impact now and in the future.

Depending on your role and the organization you are in you might or might not be in charge of the business strategy for your team. Regardless of that accountability you will need to make sure that all people in your team are aware of our business strategies and the company direction. People need to understand how their work relates to the big picture and the needs of the customers. They also need to be aware of their stakeholders and their needs. This is important for people to understand the purpose of their work but will also help them take good decisions in their day to day work. The more empowered your organization is the more important it becomes for people to be fully aware about the business strategies.

Another important aspect in the business perspective is that we take our decisions based on business impact. People in our organization should be aware of our metrics and take the right day to day decisions to maximize their impact. Tech driven decisions should also be taken with a business impact perspective and even when it is hard to quantify the impact in measurable terms we should try our best to reason about the business impact of our decisions.

As a manager in an engineering organization you will always be able to influence the technology in the organization. The amount of accountability you have as a manager for the technology area will differ from different organizations.

In the technology area we need to support people and teams to take responsibility for the short term and long term tech health of the things we own. This could for example be about helping people to describe why something technical needs to be done from a business perspective or identifying stability issues that needs to be improved due to reoccurring incidents. Besides taking actions to analyze and act on improving tech health, you might need to make sure we are using good engineering practices to produce high quality code.

Another thing that is important in the technology area is to make sure that we have good technical strategies to drive us forward. We need to make sure that we know where we are going to take good decisions today. The strategies needs to be aligned both with other technical strategies in the company as well as the overall strategy for the business.

Building Culture

You want the organization to be a great place to work were people want to stay for a long time.

A great place to work needs a good culture that enable inclusive collaboration and it needs a continuous improvement mindset. The culture needs to be friendly and people needs to be able to laugh together. But just having fun together is not what you are after, what you want is a culture where people have fun together while delivering great impact for the company.

Another thing that makes people want to stay in the organization is ability to grow and have career progression.

As managers we need to make sure that we as an organization are living our values to nurture the culture we believe in and continuously work on improving. You will always collaborate with other leads to achieve success in this area.

The Formal Manager Stuff

The leadership that comes with being a formal people manager, staffing and hiring and being a great employer.

This category includes being the employer representative in the employer – employee relationship which means that you need to make sure that the employer is fulfilling all obligations towards the employee as well as the other way around.

Driving staffing and hiring is an area that comes with the role as a people manager. The work we do to make sure that we have the right staffing in place and that we hire efficiently when needed. The staffing and hiring strategy should take diversity into account.

Another thing you will need to ensure as a manager is that the team setup we have in the organization is the right one to support delivery. You want to have enough separation to enable the team to take autonomous decisions and not becoming blocked or slowed down by their dependencies towards other teams, but you also need to ensure the right amount of collaboration to ensure that the decisions are good from the holistic picture as well.