This presentation was recorded at GOTO Berlin 2019. #GOTOcon #GOTOber
http://gotober.com

Lena Reinhard - Director of Engineering at CircleCI

ABSTRACT
Technical leadership. Hands-on coding. Process management. Project management. Delivery. People management. Architecture decisions. Product oversight. Hiring.—With so many things on an engineering manager’s plate, is it any wonder that many great engineers flounder as engineering managers?
Yet, in order to retain engineers in a competitive job market, you have to invest in building and supporting your engineering managers. Individuals don’t leave jobs or companies -- they leave managers who aren’t equipped to support them.
In this talk, I will explain how our organisations currently set engineering managers up to fail, and what we need to change to help them, and their teams, succeed. I'll share personal anecdotes and examples of how I got my teams on the right track through:

• Redesigning team and organisational structure
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities
• Outlining clear paths for growth for engineers and managers (and growth paths that don’t include management)
• Rethinking how to hire engineering managers, and what to look for when [...]

Read the full abstract here:
https://gotober.com/2019/sessions/1047/what-engineering-managers-should-do-and-why-we-don-t

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Translators note I have a very complicated relationship with birds.

When I'm in the street, I really, really hate pigeons.

Their fast movements make me super nervous.

On the other hand, though, I really love watching swarms of birds leave the area in autumn.

I also like when they return in spring, though.

A few months ago, I read an article which talked about whooping cranes.

The whooping crane is the tallest North American bird.

It's also endangered largely due to habitat loss.

There are only 600 of them left in the entire world.

300 of them spent their winter in the National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

The author of this article I read is named CJ Hauser and she was doing research for a book that she was working on.

She joined some researchers and other volunteers on a data gathering expedition.

And in her article, she wrote, here is what I learned once I started studying whooping cranes.

Only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds.

Instead, we counted berries, counted crabs, measured water salinity, measured the speed of the wind, stood in the mud.

It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don't spend a lot of time staring at the bird you want to save, you look at the things it relies on to live instead.

You ask if there's enough to eat and drink, is there a safe place to sleep?

In the same way as research on whooping cranes works, I believe that there are 2 fundamental things that we need to look at when we think about engineering management as a practice.

We need to understand the people that we work with, and we need to look at how to build an environment which they can thrive in.

In this talk, I want to answer questions like what are the challenges we see in engineering management today?

What do humans need at work and how can we as engineering managers make sure to provide it?

What makes teams high-performing and how do we as managers support organisations?

And, eventually, what does all of this mean for what engineering managers should do?

Let's start by talking about some of the challenges in engineering management today.

I believe that to understand what makes a good engineering manager, we first need to look at what we think makes a good engineer.

Software engineering is still a relatively young profession.

It's a running joke in our industry that titles don't mean anything.

The requirements and what it means to be a junior, senior, staff, principal engineer, or any other title you can think of, they vary greatly.

I also really wish that there were less job postings along the lines of seeking junior engineer with 5 years' experience.

Is it knowledge of specific frameworks, programming languages, or something else entirely?

And how do engineers grow beyond where they're at?

Today, a common scenario in many tech companies is that engineers start out in their career, they increase their technical skills, gain more responsibilities, move up in the hierarchy, and eventually become a manager.

But should the ultimate destination of an engineer's career be a management role, or something else?

And What should the role of a manager look like to support those engineers and their growth?

I was looking for a new engineering management role last year, and initially, I was in touch with over 50 companies, and this question was 1 of the most recurring ones.

The expectations that these companies had towards engineering managers varied greatly.

People management of 8 to 14 or more reports, as well as technical leadership, technical decision-making, hands-on coding every day, project, product, and process management.

But what should these management roles look like?

And how can organisations make sure to set up managers for success?

And what is the impact of this ambiguity around engineering management on the managers?

In my career so far, I've interviewed more than 100 engineering managers for roles on my team.

1 question I like asking candidates is why they're looking to make a change.

A theme in many responses I've gotten has been overwhelm.

People talking about how in their current roles they're wearing way too many hats.

They have too many responsibilities that they need to juggle at all times.

And they feel like they're not able to deliver well on any of them, are always stressed out, worst case, even burned out, and aren't doing justice by their teams or the people in them.

These and many more stories I've heard from fellow engineering managers can be summarised as just too much.

Now, if you are in a role where you're doing all those things and you're able to do them well, and you feel good about it, congratulations, you are a unicorn, or another mythical creature of your choice.

But, if you're in such a role and you're constantly stressed out and feel like you're not doing any of your responsibilities justice, I also want to let you know I hear you, and you're not alone in this.

If you're an organisation, though, and you're looking to hire such a unicorn, I want to tell you already, they're pretty hard to find, and some people even say they don't exist.

Now, these overloaded roles also have impact on engineers.

In 12 per cent of cases, the manager is the primary reason why people leave companies, but it is leadership in 28 per cent, and development opportunities at 52 per cent.

All of those are really tightly linked with the questions we've raised so far.

Organisations often struggle to figure out what makes good engineers, how to grow them and how to make sure to have managers support them well.

Eventually, many engineers get frustrated with their managers, and their career development opportunities as well as the company as a whole.

This is ultimately, unfortunately, still a common theme in many tech companies right now.

I think that all these questions and challenges are serious issues, and I would like to propose an alternative perspective today.

When we talked about cranes earlier, the main conclusion was that we need to understand the people that we work with and how to build an environment they can thrive in.

This is why, for shaping engineering management as a practice, I want to propose a different human-centric approach which focuses on people's needs.

Now, my own thinking of this has been influenced by people like Laura Hogan, Camille Fournier, and Marco Rogers, and many others who have been thinking in this direction for many years.

It's also been impacted by my own background.

I'm not an engineer, and my work has always been about the people and the environment they exist in at work.

So, what does human-centric engineering management look like?

The environment in which we operate in as engineering managers consists of 3 major factors.

We support engineers, we work with teams, as well as organisations.

Each of those has their different needs and needs to be addressed in different ways.

This is why I think of our role as a service or support role.

We work at the intersections of different areas, we're involved in different areas, and we need to translate between them and support their respective needs.

I want to talk about our support role as engineering managers by focusing on these 3.

Supporting organisations, supporting teams, and supporting individual engineers.

And Let's start by talking about individuals.

When we think about people at work, I want to take 1 more step back and look at how our brains work.

Our brains are set up to be highly responsive and sensitive to threats.

The same mechanism that used to protect us from wild animals still exists today.

Our amygdala is almond-shaped and located deep in our temporal lobe.

It's on the lookout for anything in our environment that could be a threat.

When it senses danger, it makes a split-second decision and begins a fight-or-flight response.

This fight-or-flight response triggers the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into our bloodstream.

Our heart races, we sweat, we shake, we start feeling nauseous, and we can't think clearly.

Now we will hopefully rarely encounter a wild bear in the office that could trigger that response, but there are still other threats in our modern workplaces.

Research has exposed 6 human core needs that humans have, including at work.

The performance coach and trainer Paloma Medina coined what she describes as the biceps model of 6 human core needs.

These needs motivate us in our behavior, and if those needs aren't met, we sense that they're threatened, or we lack in some areas, our amygdala will perceive a threat and will initiate fight-or-flight response.

This is why understanding these core needs will help us shape our understanding of the humans we work with, and how to support them best.

As humans, we strive to be part of a community of like-minded people where we understand each other and support each other.

We want to feel cared for and happy and healthy ourselves, and we seek the same for the people around us.

We also feel like we're not being othered, discriminated against, or marginalised.

Belonging is really important to me personally.

I love working in a distributed team but I also really enjoy seeing my team in person every once in a while.

We also seek to continuously learn, improve, and grow in areas that matter to us.

And also in areas that matter to our team or our company.

This is 1 of the needs that matters to me the most as well.

I work with a management coach to help me grow in my career.

I also love reading nonfiction books to always learn something new.

And I started taking piano lessons last year and still have a lot to learn in that area.

We desire having choice, control, and autonomy over important areas for us.

We also want to be able to make decisions about those areas.

In a previous role that I was working in, I took a lot of work on to drive organisational change, but ultimately, the control I had over my domain was really limited due to organisational issues.

Eventually, it led to me leaving this role.

We seek the feeling that our ability to contribute but also our access to information, money, time, and other resources is fair and equal for everyone.

Not just ourselves, but also the people around us.

We also want everyone's needs to be treated as equally important.

We currently have 1 team that's distributed across 3 major geographical areas, and to help everyone have equal access, they switch the timings of their team meetings every week so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute.

We look for certainty, safety, and stability in our lives.

We want to feel certain that resources like money, time, or information are available to us in a way that we can do our job well or achieve our goals.

We also want goals, strategy, and direction to be consistent and not change too fast or at all times.

I've been leading teams in fast-growing start-ups for the last couple of years, and it can be a challenge when there is a lot of change going on to instil some sense of predictability in teams.

I also had to work on my own ability to deal with change, so I'm able to support others better through it but also deal better with it myself.

Deep down, all of us seek meaning, importance, and status.

This includes, for example, where we are at in a hierarchy, and whether our work and our title or role are perceived by people around us whose opinions matter to us.

It also means being appreciated for our work by people whose opinions mean something to us.

A while back, a team-mate of mine sent me an email talking about some projects I'd been working on and let me know how much that work meant to them and how the projects had impacted them positively.

This meant a lot to me, and I still think back of it really fondly.

So this is the biceps model of 6 human core needs.

Belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance.

Why is it so important for us to meet those human core needs at work, though?

Feeling that these needs are threatened will put us in fight-or-flight mode which is literally stressful.

It harms our ability to think clearly, it impacts our productivity as well as our well-being.

Stress has vast negative short-term but also long-term effects on all of us.

This is why not meeting the core needs has such high cost for organisations.

It harms the people on our teams and will ultimately harm our business.

If we are 100 per cent connected to a team, culture, or idea at all times, it can also get at odds with our need for uniqueness and significance.

If everything is changing constantly, it stresses many of us out, but if everything is always predictable, it easily gets boring and demotivating.

And not all of these aspects matter to everyone equally.

As mentioned, I deeply care about belonging and improvement, but some of the people on my team care much more about other factors.

So to start out, I would like to encourage you to think about what matters to you personally.

Knowing what motivates us and what we need the most will also help us understand our own responses emotionally to situations, and it also helps us reflect on our position and what drives our own thinking much better.

Now let's use those learnings about human core needs to translate the BICEPs model into action, and especially in our thinking and practice about what our role as engineering managers should be about.

Specifically starting out with supporting engineers.

The foundation of being a good engineering manager is getting to know the people that we work with, and understanding what is important to them.

We can't guess what motivates others or what they feel threatened by.

I think 1 of the most powerful tools we have as managers is asking good questions.

Listening, observing, taking note of what motivates our teammates, and really digging into their responses to our questions is the basis for doing our jobs well.

When I start working with someone, I like to have a longer conversation with them about what matters to them, what motivates them or what's frustrated them in the past.

Open questions are especially helpful, asking things like what did you think about this project, or how can we improve our incident response?

These kinds of questions with follow-up questions added can be helpful to really dig into what drives people.

I also usually gather some questions before I meet with my teammates one-on-one, so I'm prepared and I can guide the conversation towards understanding them better.

Over time, I've also built a kind of kit of one-on-one questions that I like pulling out when I need some inspiration.

Asking questions also helps us adjust our leadership style to the people we're leading, and it also enables us to make sure that they feel understood and heard, which is a really important pillar of inclusion and belonging.

Now, people are full of surprises, which probably everyone knows who has ever met a person.

I once received a message from an engineer on my team who was deeply upset about a specific wording used in a product release note to customers.

I had been aware of discussions about that release note, but I didn't understand their strong reaction, to be honest.

But I got curious in what was going on, and we ended up talking.

It turned out that they had agreed upon a specific wording with another team who was responsible for that, but it ultimately got overruled by someone with more power than they had.

It made them feel helpless and made them feel like they weren't able to have positive impact on our customers in their domain.

And they felt threatened in their core needs for choice and equality.

I've experienced situations like these many times in my career.

People reacting emotionally in a way that I hadn't expected at all.

And especially as I've moved on to managing several teams and now leading an organisation, the potential for surprises has only increased just through the number of people I'm directly or indirectly managing.

Now, in such cases, it's really easy to complain about entitlement or how dare people have opinions on such banal things.

But all of us are humans, including at work.

To start, I think surprises like these are a really good opportunity to reflect on our own position.

My own perception and experience aren't universal, and my privilege impacts the way I see the world.

There is also my role which impacts how much information context I have access to, and it also impacts how I perceive what is going on at work.

What I perceive as no big deal, or logical, or rational can be enormous threats to other people around me.

Such cases where people react in those kinds of unexpected ways are really good opportunities for us to focus on human-centric responses, like giving them time to unwind, or giving them an opportunity to talk through it.

It's our job as managers to understand and support people and communicate in such ways that their needs are met.

Understanding better what motivates our team-mates also helps us nurture significance.

There is a lot of power in meaning, and knowing where people are having an impact can be a really great motivator for all of us.

This means, for example, helping engineers understand how their work connects to the bigger picture, how it ties into company goals, how it's important strategically for the organisation, how it helps users, or how it supports other teams.

We can also see the significance by involving our team-mates in the decisions we make.

Feeling that decisions are fair and equitable is an important component of the BICEPS model, as we've seen.

When we make decisions, it's helpful to ask everyone for their opinions at first, and really listen and genuinely take their opinions into account.

Now, it won't always be possible to go with what everyone wants, but we can still do a good job at contextualising the decisions we make, understanding why we did or did not make a certain choice, and helping people understand that their feedback has been taken into account.

I also think feedback is a really important tool for all of us.

As managers, we should ask for feedback regularly, because it's the only thing that helps us adjust, especially in our leadership style and in the actions we take.

Giving feedback to engineers regularly helps with predictability.

It helps people understand where they're at, our expectations towards them, and puts them in a position to course-correct quickly if needed.

Praise specifically helps nurture significance a lot.

We have a Slack channel at CircleCI called Gratitude where people share praise for others and it's 1 of my favourite Slack channels there.

It's really great being part of a team where people do kind things for each other, help each other out, and where that's becoming visible in such a way.

We can also support engineers by investing in their growth.

We can start by asking questions to understand where they want to go in their career and what meaningful progress looks like for them.

We can also set development goals and assign them tasks that help them grow further.

We can also encourage them to take classes, visit conferences, read books, take online training, or help each other out through mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and skill-sharing.

To help with growth, I find coaching and sponsorship really helpful.

Coaching and sponsoring ourselves or encouraging others to do it are really helpful with significance.

Coaching specifically is focused on guiding people towards finding answers themselves.

It isn't directive and it doesn't offer immediate solutions to problems people are approaching us with.

This way, coaching helps people train their leadership skills but also problem-solving skills.

It also increases learning, resilience, and self-management.

If you want to get started with coaching, the book The Coaching Habit by Michael Bangestanier is a good starting point.

And then there is sponsorship, which I think all of us need to do more of.

Many years ago, I had a manager who was really invested in me.

I was in my first real job, and he saw that I was eager to grow and learn.

He put my name forward in a discussion with his peers about an exciting project, and convinced them to take a chance on me and let me take the lead.

He also gave me lots of constructive feedback along the way with specific examples of what I could improve in.

Later on, he also made sure that I got another opportunity to join a different team.

He and I stopped working together many, many years ago, but he was hugely influential on my career.

Now, I want to encourage you, think back in your own career and whether you've had someone who did something like this for you.

Who connected you with others, who put your name forward, who used their influence to make a difference in your career.

Be invested in their growth, in lifting them up, and put your weight behind them and their success.

I've been trying out different approaches to sponsorship.

For example, knowing that someone was interested in public speaking, sending them CFPs, reviewing their submissions and giving them feedback on their talk preparation.

With other people, I invested in helping them move into new roles and get supported along the way or take on the lead in exciting projects.

Getting invested this way into someone's success can make a really huge difference.

As you've seen so far, the foundation of our work as engineering managers is getting to know engineers, keeping them connected with a purpose, giving feedback, and investing in their growth.

Now let's build on this by talking about how we support several people.

The first 1 is psychological safety, which means believing that we won't be rejected and feel free to express our work-relevant thoughts and feelings to the people around us.

It also means believing that others won't think less of us if we make a well-intentioned mistake or ask for help.

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What Engineering Managers Should Do (and Why We Don’t) • Lena Reinhard • GOTO 2019