Principles for a Software Engineering Manager and Leader to Live By 🏆
Leader's Principles 🏆
To be Remembered (for you, as EM/Team Lead) 👇
General
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| respect is earned, not given | dont expect that if you are manager, you are automatically respected |
| principles are more important than process[1] | adding processes is easy, removing (or simplifying) processes is the hard part, teach your team principles to help them do right decisions, rather than adding processes to slow things down |
| focus on what you can give to people, not what you can get from them | you are there for your team, not the other way around |
| your only job is to improve people's lives | (yours and those around you) |
| don't act helpless, that makes you helpless [2] | if you act helpless, that makes you helpless, and if you are helpless, why are you leader at all? |
| Give missions over instructions and trust the team | |
| be vulnerable, but don't ever loose your cool [3] | if somebody confronts you, dont get mad/angry... if you dont know what to say, respond with "i will think about it, and get back to you" |
| be kind, but not nice | and know how it differs to be kind, and not just nice [4] |
People Growth
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| care about people, and set them for the success (or at least try to help them to success i what they want[^1 | you help them, they help you / they learn from you, you learn from them |
| dont assume your expectations from your DR are clear for them [ | and always share them in written form (and ideally on one single place/document) |
| regularly practice the keeper test, to help you identify how to grow tour DRs | if the your DR comes to you, that he/she wants to quite, would you do eveything in your power to prevent it? if not, you should fire him/her |
| be honest, but not brutal -> brutal honesty is bullshit | do i look fat in these jeans? and answer: I like the other jeans better #communication/feedback |
| Rather than always providing answers, give your team "tools" to find answers for themself | your job is to help the team to come up with solutions to the problem, not to give them solution directly (otherwise they will not learn to be independent |
| you should not reward outcome, you should reward initiative | if you reward the person with huge initiative, you will get even more initiative → this is how to build a culture supporting innovation [5] |
Communication
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| don't be afraid to say: I don't know | if you appear to have all the answers all the time, team members will never raise their hand for help, staying blocked or making decisions with poorer outcomes! so, lead by example and dont be afraid to say “i dont know” |
| Never complain to anyone (peers, DRs, Manager) | Instead of complaining, build relationships with key decision-makers. |
| over-communicating is just the right amount [6] (especially important for #remoteculture ) | I would rather have my people share too much than share too little. If you think you communicated something 100%, it is probably somewhere around 60%, |
| empathy over sympathy | #^4349494 |
| always assume the other person knows something you don't know [7] | It will give you ability to navigate smoothly any hard conversation. |
| Don't ever lie about anything | But if you have to, always include as much fictional detail as possible to make your story seem "trustworthy". |
Negotiation & Conflicts
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| don't seek 100% agreement, make sure 80% is on board[8] | the rest should follow #leadership/disagree-and-commit. Remember, if you are doing a change that is 100% agreement, you are most likely not doing enough significant change |
| Conflicts are always subjective (personal), something like "unbiased" conflict does NOT exist | Most conflict happens because people don’t feel heard or don't feel like they have agency to control their world. [9], or because their values were threathened, and now you should ask "which values, and why?" [10] |
Meetings
| the best meetings are those, where others do the talking, but you facilitate through intelligent questions | Running a meeting with smart people is like prompting an AI well. |
Feedback
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| if giving feedback, show examples rather than describing the situation | for giving feedback, it is critical to communicate expectations clearly, and it is easier with providing examples rather than describing some "imaginary" situation |
| adhere 5:1 ratio[11] | give at least 1 praise to 5 corrective feedback |
| normalize feedback[12] | conflict-avoidant feedback culture degrades the talent bar, and that does not mean you are being kind, and it does NOT set people up for success |
Team Management
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| no bad teams, only bad leaders | |
| bad decisions of team are always caused by not enough context | overcommunication do not exists |
| Their victories are their own, but their failures are yours, and yours alone. |
Hiring
| Principle | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| dont hire for the skills, hire for the value (and train for the skills if needed) | look for somebody who could be better in your role than you are / which skills the person can teach your team? |
| hire for bottlenecks, not for opportunities[13] | you have to create bottleneck first, in order to justify the hire |
Habits of 🔝 Engineering Managers
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do async conversations with videos. eg we didn't have time to catch up today, so let me give you my thoughts on... #remoteculture [14]
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When you listen to somebody's personal issue, don’t give a solution or advice — when a person opens up with their most intimate troubles, they don’t want a solution — just real, honest understanding and acceptance, don't be afraid say "I don't know what to say" #communication/tip
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👉 on personal or sensitive situations, always respond with empathy first, once you have shown your empathy you can continue asking for more details and clear your questions #communication
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You are not meant to always provide a piece of advice or fix for the issues DR shares with you, be empathetic, sometimes saying "i don't really know what to say to this, but thanks a lot for sharing it with me,"
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Remember that people don’t leave bad jobs — they leave because of bad relationships with the people they report to
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Let your team members learn how to make decisions. A simple starting point “how”, is to let them interpret decisions which just have been made by asking: ok, what does this brings us to? … based on that, what decision we should?
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Getting feedback regularly on something you are trying to change? Here is how to respond: i get it, i am working on it, and please keep pointing it out
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avoiding giving critique feedback does not mean being kind, and does not set the people up for success [12:1]
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apply Continuous Delegation: "I have to continuously replace myself" → once I understood how to do something, my job was to delegate or automate such work
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progressively overload your teams, expecting them to be a little better today than they were yesterday [15]
VIDEO - Product management theater - Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) ↩︎
EX - Are you really kind, or are you just being nice (milý vs. laskavý) ↩︎
VIDEO - WEBINAR - Effective Engineering Leadership - Marian Kamenistak ↩︎
VIDEO - Thinking About Thinking with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - A Bit of Optimism Podcast ↩︎
VIDEO - Bending the universe in your favor - Claire Vo ↩︎ ↩︎
EX - Hierarchies, bottlenecks, and high-leverage time💡#^51fab3 ↩︎
VIDEO - How to Run a Remote Big Tech 🏢 — with Farhan Thawar (Shopify) ↩︎
This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.
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