Breaking the Bad Leadership Cycle in Engineering and Tech

If you work in engineering or tech, I want you to think about all the bosses you've had and the other managers you've observed throughout your career.

How many of them were actually good leaders?

Probably a pretty low percentage, right? There's a reason for this. It's called the bad leadership cycle, and it's creating a huge negative impact throughout engineering and tech.

Stay tuned.

​Hey everyone, and welcome to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Doug Howard. I'm a former director of engineering, but today, I focus on helping engineering managers and tech leaders build the mindset, tools, and strategies that you need to increase your impact, scale up in your role, and advance to the next level of your career.

What Causes the Bad Leadership Cycle in Engineering?

That's exactly what we're gonna focus on today because in this episode, I'm gonna explain what the bad leadership cycle is and how it's impacting engineering and tech industries. But I'm gonna start by sharing my experience with the bad leadership cycle.

My first boss told me something I'll never forget. He told me, engineering school doesn't teach you how to be an engineer. It teaches you how to think like an engineer. Later on in my career, I realized something else. Engineering school doesn't teach you how to be a leader either, and it also doesn't teach you how to think like a leader.

My first boss, he was a great engineer, but he really wasn't a good leader. In fact, he was a terrible leader. He'd openly talk about politics and make other people on the team feel uncomfortable. Whenever you went to him for help, he'd make you feel like an idiot and say things like, because that's the way we've always done it before. Whenever you went to him for help, he'd always make you feel like an idiot. He'd make fun of people in other departments. He was never available to train me or help me or mentor me or teach me when I was stuck.

He had no business being a manager, but he was our best engineer. And because he was a top performing engineer in our company, he got promoted to a leadership role. Now, this all happened way before I worked there, but I'm just trying to paint a picture here. He was a top performing engineer and that's why he got promoted into a leadership role, and this is very common throughout engineering.

Managing Without the Necessary Skills

Now, later on in my career I moved into a leadership position and he was the only boss I had in my career at that time. So when I moved into that leadership role, I really didn't get any training and I didn't know what, I didn't know. I didn't know how to be a leader. He was the only role model, or, I guess you can recall him a role model, but not really. He was a bad role model. He was the only role model I had in a leadership position, and I knew that I didn't want to be a leader like him, but I didn't have any positive role models to show me what leadership really was or how to be a good leader myself.

So when I got in a leadership role, I relied on just my natural intuition, I thought, okay, be a good guy, be friendly, be helpful, help people when they're struggling and whatnot. But there's way more to leadership than that, and I was in over my head without realizing it.

Some of the struggles I faced early on, I had a very senior staff. I had some engineers that were working at this company when I was basically like in kindergarten, so they had way more experience than me, and it was very intimidating to get these people to take me seriously and, get them to cooperate with me and want to collaborate with me and treat me like an equal, let alone their boss.

And on that topic, I really didn't know how to address people that weren't performing on the team. When I was a peer, I had no problem helping people on the team. I was actually pretty good at teaching people and showing them how to do things better, but when I was their boss and they were struggling and they couldn't figure stuff out and they weren't getting it, when I told it to 'em, I didn't really know where to go with that. I didn't know how to get them to improve their performance or want to improve their performance on their own.

Another thing that was holding me back as a manager was I wasn't comfortable with delegating. I was a perfectionist and I wanted things done the right way, and I wanted them to be done the way that I liked them to be done. So I had a very hard time letting go of things and trusting my team to, to get things done the right way.

I struggled with leading upward. I didn't understand how to influence people I didn't have authority over. I didn't know how to influence cross-functional teams to give me what I needed and deliver projects on time for my team and meet the quality and accuracy expectations that we needed from them. I didn't know how to manage my boss and manage upward. A lot of times my boss was holding me up on things. I needed him to approve budgets. I needed him to approve resources. I needed him to approve overtime. I needed him to approve a lot of things, and I couldn't get him to see things my way, ever so it was constantly slowing me down in my role.

And it's all because, my company promoted me into a leadership position because I was a top performing engineer, and this is what I call the bad leadership cycle. I was never trained how to be a leader. I never learned how to develop these skills and, you hear me keep saying the word promoted to manager. Becoming a manager isn't a promotion, it's a career transition. Because leading people, understanding people, knowing how to motivate them, knowing how to inspire them, knowing how to influence their way of thinking, and communicating in a way that resonates with them and gets them to understand where you're coming from and meeting them where they're at. These are skills that are completely different than the type of skills that make you a top performing engineer.

It's Not a Promotion, It's a Career Transition

So again, moving from engineer to manager is not a promotion. It's more like a career transition and you need to build a new set of skills to be effective in that role. Otherwise, you're gonna struggle and spin your wheels forever.

This is what creates the bad leadership cycle because a lot of times companies just throw you into these roles and they expect you to figure it out on your own. It doesn't stop there either. Then they put the thumb on you to produce more, right?

You're struggling to keep up, and you think putting in more time will get you outta this hole, and you think it's just temporary. I'll just put in 50 hours a week for a few weeks to get us caught up. But that, that never happens. And meanwhile, the company just keeps putting more pressure on you.

So many engineering leaders aren't learning the skills they need to be effective in their roles as leaders. They never learn how to effectively communicate. They never learned how to manage a team. I never learned how to build these critical skills and I wasn't effective in my role because of it. This is a common tale for a lot of engineers, and it happens because of the bad leadership cycle throughout engineering and tech.

What is “The Bad Leadership Cycle”?

What's the bad leadership cycle? It starts when the first engineering manager, who is a top performing engineer, gets promoted into a leadership position but doesn't receive the training that they need to be effective in their role.

Now we think of getting promoted to management as a promotion, but it's really a career transition because it requires a completely different set of skills that don't come natural to most engineers. They're skills that you never learn or you're never taught, so you get thrown into a role that you're not qualified for.

Instead of building these skills, you basically are thrown into the deep end and you're left to figure it out on your own. Instead of solving problems, you end up putting band-aids on problems. Instead of having difficult conversations, you end up avoiding them. Instead of dealing with personnel conflicts the right way, you enable them to continue and grow worse and escalate.

When I say the bad leadership cycle, what I mean is it happens when the first manager, this happened years ago. The first manager gets promoted into this role without building these skills. Then they manage a team. Without having the skills to be an effective leader. So then they promote the next leader into this role to replace them and then so on and so on.

The Consequences

It just creates a never ending cycle of undertrained leaders throughout engineering and tech. I saw this at the companies I worked for. I've seen this at companies I didn't work for, and it's a major problem because the downstream impact is engineers aren't getting the nurturing they need to grow into their roles.

It's stifling innovation. The world has real problems right now. We need the best brains in the world. We need the best problem solvers in the world. We need them being engineers. We need them working on these problems. But instead we're putting the pressure on them, we're putting the thumb down on them.

This is a major problem.

This is what's creating high turnover throughout engineering and burnout and lack of continuity and lack of innovation.

It creates this cycle up at the top of the company, 'cause it has an impact on the bottom line. Companies are losing more money. There's there's a cost to turnover. Instead of fixing the problem, companies just put more and more pressure on their engineers to produce more and more, and the problem just gets worse and worse.

Then what happens from there is the engineering manager actually burns out and they can't take it anymore. They can't take all the pressure, so then they quit. And then guess what happens? The next most qualified person gets promoted to replace them, and that person is undertrained too. Do you see how this cycle works?

It's a never ending cycle.

My mission is to break that cycle.

Now, these undertrained managers, they never learn how to effectively communicate. They never learn how to manage a team. They get pulled into cross-functional team meetings, and they lose time away from mentoring their team. They lose efficiencies and they slap bandaids on problems instead of fixing them. They lose continuity with all the turnover on their teams. Eventually, they give up and they stop teaching. They stop mentoring. And then to make this situation become even worse, employees on their team start quitting and turnover increases. Then the manager themselves, they can't keep up anymore, so then they burn out and they stop engaging with the job and the role and the team, and finally they quit too.

How The Bad Leadership Cycle Continues

What happens is the next qualified engineer gets promoted up in the ranks based on their technical skills, but they don't get the guidance and the support that they need to be effective in their role. So this toxic cycle just continues over and over and over again.

The consequences of the bad leadership cycle in engineering are profound, and it's all because the company didn't prioritize the one thing that would've made all the difference to you, your team, and the company. And that's providing you with leadership training that helps you be effective in your role. But not just that, it's teaching you these skills in a way that resonates with you and that resonates with your logical way of thinking. Because mainstream leadership training programs and corporate leadership training programs, these are big box training solutions that they provide to all types of companies and all types of industries, but they don't really resonate with engineers. They don't resonate with our logical way of thinking, and that's why they don't get results for us.

What YOU Can Do To Break The Cycle

If you're an engineering manager or technical leader who wants to stop working in the details and start working on growing your team, or you wanna be recognized as a leading authority in your company, or you want to be the manager that people want to work for, building a team culture where everyone is fully engaged and working to their strengths and striving to reach their full potential. If you wanna leverage people skills to create efficiencies and increase productivity. If you wanna learn how to influence people on the fly by convincing them to make decisions that work in your favor.

If this is what you're looking for in your career, then I want you to sign up for my weekly newsletter because each week I share tips, tools, and strategies that will increase your impact throughout your organization by showing you how to master the science of people so that you can motivate, inspire, and influence in any direction. I included a link to the newsletter below.

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