The ONE Thing I Wish I Knew Before I Became an Engineering Manager
In this episode, I'm going to share something that would have saved me a lot of time and stress, if I had realized this before I became an engineering manager.
I'm finding out that a lot of managers and leaders still haven't figured this thing out yet, and it's preventing them from being effective in their roles.
Now first for those of you who are new to the channel, I just want to quickly introduce myself. My name is Doug Howard, and I'm a leadership coach and consultant for engineering and tech companies.
I use this channel to help engineering leaders like you increase your impact at every level of your organization. The tools, strategies and insights I cover in each episode are all applicable from all leadership levels, from emerging leader to CEO.
Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any of these insights or tools.
From Engineer to Accidental Leader
Now today, I want to share the toughest lesson I learned from early in my leadership journey. I want to start by sharing how I got into leadership.
So to give you some context here, I worked at a real small company. It had been around for a while, but it was more like a startup type company. We only had five engineers on our team. It was a family owned business. There wasn't really a lot of systems or order or processes in place. It was very based on tribal knowledge. Each person in the team had their own specific role and each person knew what they did. It was very scrappy environment, but there wasn't really good training programs or there wasn't really any scalability to it.
I had just joined the company, but this business had been around for awhile and it was a very niche market with specific customers and repeat business. So there wasn't a lot of variety going on either.
Then all of a sudden this big dynamic shift in our industry called e-commerce, this whole new market, comes up out of nowhere overnight, and it just blew up our market. There was a whole bunch of new market opportunities for us to grow and our product and our company was positioned perfectly to capitalize on this new market.
For frame of reference, when I first joined the company, we were selling about $2 million of product per year. By the time I left this company, we had blown up to selling $150 million worth of product in a year. That's how big we grew, pretty much overnight. A few years after I started the company we were getting single projects that matched our yearly sales from the year prior. So we were growing pretty big year over year, and this required a lot of adaptation.
So when I first started, you know, it was very hustle. It was very scrappy. Everyone wore multiple hats. If we needed one of the engineers to go on a project site to actually do some installation work and construction work, that's what we did. We're very nimble and adaptive. But that wasn't going to be practical to grow our business that way.
I recognized this early on. I recognized that if we're going to be hiring people at this scale. If we're going to be delivering products at this scale. If we're gonna be managing this amount of projects in the company at a given time, we needed to bring some order to this.
But because we were so small for years, there wasn't really any leadership in our company. It wasn't intentional. It was just the situation where everyone kind of self-managed themselves. It worked when we were small, but it didn't work now that we were growing and now that we had bigger projects in house. I saw this as a problem, so I just organically filled that leadership void. No one asked me to, I didn't plan it that way. I didn't look at it like, okay, I'm going to be the leader here. I just saw problems that were happening and I decided to step in and fix them.
I started with small things like recognizing that we didn't have a process in place for these recurring repair orders that were coming in. Or I realized that we didn't have a training onboarding program for new engineers that were coming aboard. Every time I saw one of these problems, I just stepped up and fixed it. I wasn't really asked to do it. I wasn't paid to do it. I just kinda did.
Then I noticed, now that we're getting these bigger projects in house, we need actually a level of project management in place. We need to break down these projects in phases. We need a little bit more specialization to divide our skills up so that we can get these projects moving more efficiently versus expecting everyone in the department to know how to do all types of unique variances and projects. Just to give you the context there, our business flipped overnight and the company didn't do anything to change how we were doing our business so I organically stepped in the disposition to just start taking on these responsibilities.
Then, because I was doing that, people started looking to me as the leader. They were looking to me when they had questions. They were looking for me to troubleshoot when they were stuck. And very early on in my career, all of a sudden, I'm the go-to person in our company. I'm the top ranking engineer. I'm the top performing engineer. Even the people that have been working there a lot longer than me with tens of years of experience, where I just had a few years at that point, they're looking to me for answers and direction and support.
Moving Into Leadership Position Without Any Training
Now I didn't get any leadership training at this point in my career. I didn't really even understand, what that meant to transition like this into a management role. It just kind of happened.
As the company started growing, we created this team leader role, which became me. So I wasn't really a full on manager yet. I was a designated team leader. Honestly I was doing the work of an engineering manager. But I think this was just what my company did to create a position because we didn't have any positions like that defined yet. So they kind of just made up the term team leader and put me in that role. But I digress.
The point that I'm getting at here is, you know, a lot of this time I was getting things done just by hands-on work. I was just rolling up my sleeves, finding a problem, and solving it on my own. Through technical skills, through logic, through collaborating with the other engineers. Figuring out how to get things done.
What I didn't realize was that I was eventually going to hit a wall and that wall hit me pretty hard. I'll explain. So things were going, I won't say smooth, but they are going smooth with me and the team for a while, because we were all on the same page. We all understood each other. We all thought the same way. But as our company was growing, you know, to put it in perspective, we were about maybe 10 to 15 employees when I first started. Now we're around 50 people total in the company. Our engineering department, I had grown it to about 10 people. There's a diverse set of people in our company now with different backgrounds, skills, perspectives, insights, ideas.
I'm reporting up to people that aren't in engineering, I'm the highest ranking engineer in our company. I'm reporting to someone who doesn't have an engineering background. So I'm getting direction from them and they don't really understand what I do nor do I really understand their perspective. So when I'm working with my engineers all the time, I could really rely on logic. I could say this is the right thing that needs to be done. This is the way we need to do this. This is the best solution and logic always prevailed in working with my engineers. If it made sense to do this, or if there was a rule to follow or if it was a quality control concern, that's what drove our decision-making within our engineering team.
But that type of logic didn't work when I was presenting my ideas upward to my manager. For perspective, my manager was actually the director of marketing. So he wasn't really in any type of relevant field related to engineering. When I would sell an idea to him, he clearly didn't get it. He didn't understand the value in it. He didn't understand why it was important. Meanwhile, a lot of the ideas he had for our team. I didn't see the value in either. I didn't think they made sense. I would kind of dismiss them quickly in my head.
The Wall I Hit on the Path to Becoming an Engineering Manager
Now for a long time, I was able to just get by on this. It didn't really create too many issues. I was able to redirect when my boss gave us an idea that wasn't good. If he was proposing like us to look into some type of software that didn't make sense, I was able to finagle my way out of it, or it would just kind of disappear on its own.
But as we keep growing and there was more stress in the company now, all of a sudden, you know, my boss was pushing me harder. He was pushing me more on his ideas and he brought up an idea that quite frankly, was in my opinion, a terrible idea. He felt like we needed to scale out our department by dividing the engineering team into three different groups. They would work on different projects and this type of project would go here. This type of project would go in this group and this type of project would go here. Now on paper, that made sense. If you're him and you don't understand what goes into our operations. That made sense.
But if you understood at the ground level, what went into these projects, you'd realize that each team was going to be incomplete because we had still not phased out of this tribal knowledge period. We wouldn't have been able to actually get the systems in place to make a system like this work anytime soon. He wanted to do an overnight switch to divide the department into three teams and it was going to be incomplete. It just wasn't going to work.
When he presented this idea to me, He presented it to me as he wanted me to lead one of the teams and it was actually going to be an engineering manager position. So it was going to be a promotion on paper, from team lead to engineering manager. I was going to be leading one of these three teams.
But I saw that it wouldn't work. So instead of gracefully accepting this promotion. I immediately picked apart why this wouldn't work. I explained how this team didn't have these specific roles in place and this team wasn't going to be able to finish projects because of this. I pointed out why there was going to be no way to have a cohesive scheduling communication coordination between these different teams as well. So I pointed out all the flaws in the system immediately out loud to him.
I was coming from a place of wanting to avoid a major problem. It was coming from a place of recognizing that this isn't going to work. This is going to be a catastrophe. This is going to create major problems for our customers, for our engineering teams, for our manufacturing plant. For, for everyone. I was doing my best to prevent the company from going down that path.
So here I am. I think I'm being noble. I'm preventing us from walking into a big disaster. I think my boss is going to reward that. He's going to look at me as thinking strategically and thinking about the company's best interest, but instead it created a huge divide between us right away.
The conversation we had got really heated, really quick. He's telling me how I'm being very difficult and I'm not being a team player. Eventually as we went back and forth talking about this, cause I didn't back down, he then tells me, look this is the position I'm offering you. If you don't want to accept this position, then there really isn't any place for you in the company.
Now that was pretty hard to hear because to that point in my life, I had never failed a class. I had never been kicked off a team. I had never been fired from a job. I'd never been rejected really in any type of sense. Not like that. This was the first time in my life and in my career where someone was basically telling me, look, you're more of a problem than a solution. And if you don't change, there's no spot for you here. Leave. The door's right there.
Now do I think my manager could have handled that differently. Yeah, probably. But at the same time, there's a lot of things I could have handled differently. Instead of just immediately picking apart his idea, I could've went around at a totally different way. I could have tried to guide him towards recognizing some of the flaws in the system by asking him questions like, what do you think we'll do in this situation? How will we handle projects like this? Or how are we going to coordinate scheduling between these three teams? Or how is this going to impact manufacturing? Instead of asking these thought provoking questions to him. I just told them exactly why my logic was better than his which quite frankly is pretty insulting if you're the other person.
The Importance of Influence for Engineering Leaders
What I learned in this experience was whether you're right or wrong, it doesn't really matter once you're in management. What matters is you have to be able to convince the other person how to agree with you. You have to convince them to see things your way cause whether you're right or wrong, doesn't matter. People don't make decisions based on logic. They make decisions based on how they feel. Their perception of you creates a filter over how they hear your ideas. So you can say the same message to three different people, and you can say it the same way, but if they don't feel good about you or they don't feel good about what you're saying, they're not going to receive the message the way you want.
This was the big realization for me as a new manager, was influence is the most important skill. Your ability to influence people, not just your team, but cross-functionally and upward, your impact is directly limited by your ability to influence people. That's in all directions because yes, obviously you need to influence your team. But what I realized in this situation was if I can't get my boss on board with my ideas and I can't communicate in a way that makes sense to him. Or resonates with him. Or disarms him. Or gets him to open up to hearing my point of view, then I can't be effective because I'm just going to be stuck doing what he wants, even if these are bad ideas.
This was a tough pill for me to swallow because, as an engineer, I'm driven by following the rules and doing things the right way. Why would you ever do something wrong when you know how to do it right. This is my way of thinking, but when you get into management, it's a little bit different. There's office politics at play and there's ego at play with other people. So you need to learn that balance of art and science here, when it comes to influencing other people.
The biggest realization I had was that influence is more efficient than logic. You can grand stand and preach all you want, but if you're not able to influence them, it's going to take you a lot longer to get to where you want to be. Whether it's pitching your idea, or advancing in your career, whatever your goals are, they take a lot longer if you don't know how to influence people.
In many cases, you won't be able to get to where you want to be if you don't know how to influence people. Decisions about you and decisions about your career and your team and your resources and your budget. They're not made by systematic equations or processes. These decisions at some point are made by people. The higher you go in your engineering career, the more likely you're going to be reporting to someone who is not an engineer. You're going to be reporting to someone who doesn't think like you. This is where influence really comes into play because you need to understand other people. You need to understand how other people think. You need to understand your own biases as well.
When I was butting heads with my boss. I had my own biases going on and I didn't realize it in that moment. I was dismissing his ideas automatically because I thought, well, he's not an engineer, so what does he know? He doesn't understand what I do. His ideas don't make sense. I wasn't as open-minded, as I should have been to his ideas. In retrospect, his system was not the right solution, but I did not give it a chance. I did not listen to it with an open mind and I didn't have an open discussion with them. I put a wall up right away explaining no, this won't work. End of story. And what did that do? You know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. He put a wall up too and told me get in or get out.
Just to kind of point out these relationships here. Influence matters more than anything as an engineering manager and I really did not appreciate the importance of this skill when I moved into leadership. I did read books on leadership when I moved into management and I did take leadership training courses to try to learn these skills, but a lot of them honestly just didn't resonate with me. It was all about being outgoing and it was all about being people oriented. It was all about having small talk and it was all about scripted conversations and things like this with people. None of this resonated with my way of thinking. It just didn't work for me. So I was struggling to figure these things out on my own.
Instead I took a different approach. I eventually figured this out. The whole idea here is you need to understand people. In order to understand people, you need to understand human psychology. You need to understand how people think. You need to understand your thinking style as well. How is that different from the way other people think? At the end of the day, what influence is in the simplest definition, is it's motivating the other person to want the same thing you want so that you're both pulling in the same direction versus pulling apart and not getting anywhere. That's a stalemate.
Instead, you build more momentum by figuring out what they want and creating a clear connection between the thing you want and the thing they want. That way you're both working for the same thing.
I didn't do that with my boss. Like I said, I would have handled that differently in retrospect because the consequence of me handling it that way was it took me a lot longer to get into that role than I want it to be in. Instead of me putting up that wall, had I been more open-minded and had a discussion about it, we probably could have gotten closer to seeing eye to eye a lot quicker. Instead I had to put in a lot of work to repair that relationship and I had to take a step backwards. So I had to do it his way. Ultimately I decided to accept the position, knowing that this system would fail. I had to let it fail. I had to let it fail so that he could see that. It's because I didn't do the work on the front end to get him to hear me out. That is my fault. It costs the company a lot of time and resources. Going down a dead end path that I knew wouldn't work, but it was all because I didn't know how to explain it in a way that resonated with my boss.
Repair Damaged Relationship with the Boss
Now what was really going on with my boss is he felt like it was a slap in the face. He felt like I didn't appreciate the opportunity he was giving me. So I had to repair that relationship by making sure he knew I appreciated him and the opportunities he was giving me. I had to go out of my way for a long time, for about a year of just pointing out every time I appreciated something he was doing for me.
When I accepted the position, I told him how much I appreciated this opportunity that he was giving me. When he spent one-on-one coaching time with me, I made sure every time they tell him how much I appreciated the insights he was giving me. I can go on and on, but I made sure to explain to him each time outwardly, Hey, I really appreciate you and what you're doing. Or your ideas. Or your support. I had to do that to repair the relationship so that he would actually want to listen to me again. I would have saved myself so much time had I just taken that type of approach on the front end. Then he'd be more open to hearing my negative ideas.
This is what influence is, and it really revolves around understanding human psychology and understanding how people think and more importantly, how you think and how other people think differently. When you realize that people think differently, it makes complete sense by people aren't sold on your logic. They're not sold on your way of thinking they're sold on their way of thinking. So you have to explain things in a way that resonates with them, that captures their motives or it connects with something that's important to them. Otherwise, you're going to be pushing a lot more than you need to. It's going to be a lot more effort to get them where you want them to be and to get yourself where you want to be.
How to Influence and Motivate Other People
Now take a step back from everything we just talked about. I want to point something out. As an engineering manager, your biggest challenges and your biggest roadblocks and time sucks aren't related to technical skills, most likely. It's more things like keeping your team focused, engaged, and productive. It's effectively communicating to all staff levels, including upward and cross-functionally. It's navigating office politics and resolving conflicts, because those are a real thing. Office politics and playing the game. That's a real thing that you need to understand that art. It's also about gaining buy-in and getting what you need from external departments. And like what I just talked about here, it's about convincing your boss to support your big ideas. This all funnels up to you need to know how to win people to your way of thinking. Navigating all these types of situations that I was just talking about, requires more than logic facts and objective analysis. You need to know how to motivate others, to make decisions that work in your favor.
It took me a long time to build these skills and it required a lot of trial and error. But if you want the fast track to building these critical skills, and if you want to gain confidence in your ability to influence people, register for my free mini masterclass on How to Increase Your Impact Through Influence.
I hosted this training a few months ago, but I've gotten so much positive feedback since then that I've decided to give everyone free access to the replay. By the end of this free training, you're going to learn how you can influence decisions, inspire change, and motivate behavior at every level of your organization without relying on authority.
In the masterclass I share three stories for how I used influence. The first story I share, how I motivated an underperforming direct report to create their own performance improvement plan, just from one discussion. Within a year of that conversation with them, they were actually moved into their first leadership role, which is something that they didn't see coming, or I didn't see coming, going into that conversation.
The second story I share how I used influence to regain control of a situation where a cross-functional director who outranked me in the company kept roadblocking me and my team. He kept forcing agendas on our team that was really slowing us down. So I share how I regained control of that situation.
Now here's the big one that you're gonna be most interested in. The third story I share is how I use these influence techniques to get promoted from manager to director, without even asking for the promotion.
At the end of the training, I explained the framework I used in each of these three stories that you can adapt and apply it to your unique situations. You don't want to miss this free opportunity to level up your leadership skills. I'm going to include a link to register for this in the description of this episode.
This masterclass is perfect for engineering leaders who want to inspire your team to want to elevate their performance. It's also perfect for engineering managers who want to know how to deliver constructive feedback in a positive way. If you want to learn how to drive decisions that are above your pay grade to work in your favor. If you want to learn how to motivate external teams to deliver complete information on time, instead of just throwing stuff over the fence at your team. It's also perfect. If you want to learn how to influence difficult people to cooperate in, buy into your ideas.
If you're interested in improving any of these areas, check out my Mini Masterclass “Increase Your Impact As an Engineering Leader”. You'll gain instant access to watch the free mini masterclass recording at your convenience.
check out my FREE mini masterclass - “increase your impact as an engineering leader”
Learn How to Influence People to Create Efficiencies and Save Time
Stop following, waiting, and letting other people dictate your time.
Start leading, inspiring, and creating impact for your team and organization
Join me for this FREE 60 minute on-demand MINI MASTERCLASS to learn how you can INFLUENCE decisions, INSPIRE change, and MOTIVATE behavior at every level of the organization.