Intro

There is one really important thing to know if you want to grow to lead roles. It's shifting your mindset.

From: How can I be the best in my craft?
To: How can I help others to be the best at their craft?

It’s multiplying thinking, which can have infinite impact. With such mindset, you can help 5, 10, 100 or even 10k+ people! It’s one of the most impactful things that you can do in any organization.

And this is the exact kind of mindset and culture great engineering leaders create.

In today’s article I am sharing my personal progression from trying to be a hero and do everything myself to adjusting my mindset → empowering and uplifting others.

This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:

- I used to believe that being a leader means that you need to be the best at what you do
- I made the mistake of trying to do everything myself when I first became a Team Lead
🔒 These are the changes that made me a LOT better Team Lead and got me promoted to Engineering Manager
🔒 I started to assign ownership and responsibility
🔒 I started to trust more
🔒 I started to expose business problems
🔒 I started to listen more and talk less
🔒 I started to become more of a coach and less of a player
🔒 Getting better as a Team Lead got me promoted to Engineering Manager
🔒 These are the same things I do now, just on a bigger scale and a bit differently
🔒 Last words

Resources mentioned in the article:

• I am not a fan of heroism in the engineering industry (paid article)

• From IC to manager (paid article)

• How to have great 1:1 meetings (paid article)

• Guidelines for giving feedback to direct reports (paid article)

Let’s go straight into it.

I used to believe that being a leader means that you need to be the best at what you do

This was especially prominent when I was just starting my career. I thought great leaders are the best engineers, with the most experience in the team/organization, who have all the answers and they are never wrong.

I also thought that the best leaders do the most tasks and can handle any task swiftly and easily. The so-called “Hero Engineers” nowadays.

You can also read why I am not a fan of heroism in the engineering industry (paid article).

Well, the more I grew, the more I saw and realized that this stigma is not correct.

As I progressed in my career, I saw that we are all learning all the time, no matter the title, seniority or years of experience.

We also all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect.

I saw how important is to understand this in the engineering industry where things are changing very fast and if you don’t keep up with learning new things, you start stagnating.

Even though I knew that being a leader doesn’t mean you need to be the best and do the most tasks, I’ve made the mistake of trying to be that.

And I did that in order to show everyone that I deserve to lead the team and not because of not knowing. I needed to learn this is not the way to go → the hard way.

Let’s go to that next.

I made the mistake of trying to do everything myself when I first became a Team Lead

This was one of the bad mistakes that I made when I first became a Team Lead. I wanted to be the best engineer, best manager, always energized and always have all the answers.

I wanted to mimic what made me a good developer + add additional responsibilities. Well, it didn’t work so well.

I was trying to balance leading meetings, having 1:1s, strategy, planning, regularly communicating with stakeholders, etc. and also finish the most tasks as well to show the team why I am worthy to be a Team Lead.

Working on the weekends was common for me. On the weekdays, I focused more on being a manager and on the weekends I focused on finishing tasks.

It got me close to burning out and I needed to make a change. If I wouldn’t I would probably need a longer break.

I knew I needed to start delegating more, empowering and uplifting others around me. I needed to start creating leaders around me.

You can read my full story of how I became a manager and all the mistakes that I made here: From IC to manager (paid article).

These are the changes that made me a LOT better Team Lead and got me promoted to Engineering Manager...