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Thanks to Hygraph for sponsoring this newsletter. Let’s get back to today’s thought!

Intro

I used to believe that as a leader, I needed to know everything. When I first grew from a senior software engineer to a team lead, leading a team of 5 people, I tried to take on the hardest tasks, finish the most tasks, have everything under control, and also work on weekends.

The team felt like I was trying to do everything myself and didn’t trust anyone around me. Well, that got me quite close to burning out, and I was forced to make a change.

I made a deliberate change to start delegating more and empowering and trusting my team. Things turned out a lot better after that.

As a leader, you are not judged by your individual contributions but by the success of your team and projects. So, remember that making others around you better is your number-one goal.

Now that we understand what’s really important, we’ll go over 6 actions you can take to become an engineering leader everyone wants to work with.

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

- Be a Team Player
- Take a step back from individual work and look at the big picture
- Regularly check in with your teammates
- Learn and grow together as a team
- Manage Up, Down, and Sideways
🔒 Create a Positive Work Environment
🔒 Don’t Blame
🔒 Coach and Mentor
🔒 Empower and Uplift Your Team
🔒 Last words

Let’s start with the first one!

My upcoming book “The Multiplier Mindset” published by O’Reilly

This article is an adapted version of one of the chapters of my upcoming book called “The Multiplier Mindset”, published by O’Reilly. The book will be published in mid-to-late October this year.

Learn more about the book

Be a Team Player

It’s really important to make the mindset shift as an engineering leader and transform the way you think. It should be a lot less “I” (“I did this.”) and a lot more “we” (“We as a team did this.”).

In software development, it’s really all about the team, the projects we’re working on, and the goals we’re trying to achieve. And one of the best ways you can be a team player is to put your team’s success first.

Here are some actionable tips that will make you a team player as a leader.

Take a step back from individual work and look at the big picture

Ask yourself the following questions every day to determine what you can do to help your team:

• Is there someone who’s stuck and needs help?

• Does the team have everything they need to be successful?

• Is a senior leader asking for something important?

Regularly check in with your teammates

You can check in with them through 1:1 meetings or quick chats at the start of team meetings. See how they’re doing, both in their work and personally.

Did someone just come back from a trip? Ask about it. On Monday mornings, ask how their weekend was. These small moments of connection go a long way toward building trust and supporting your team.

And when your teammates feel supported, the whole team performs better.

Learn and grow together as a team

You want to avoid creating or perpetuating knowledge silos, in which only one person knows how to do something. As a leader, create opportunities for knowledge sharing.

Use meetings, Slack, or other channels to encourage people to share what they’ve learned. If someone discovers something new, have them explain it briefly and share what new they have learned.

That way, everyone will benefit and the whole team will get stronger together.

Work on your own teamwork skills

If you’re not already a team-oriented person by nature, it’s a good idea to consciously develop teamwork as a skill.

If you’re not sure how to do this, I recommend finding a hobby or activity outside work in which you collaborate or work with a group to achieve a goal.

This could be playing sports (or video games or board games), working on a side project, taking part in a community, or something else.

Manage Up, Down, and Sideways

To be considered a great engineering leader to work with, you need to manage up well (to your manager, leadership, and stakeholders), down (to your team) and sideways (to your peers).

If you mishandle one part and don’t build a decent working relationship, the other parts may suffer.

A mistake I made as a new team lead and later as an engineering manager was shielding my team too much and trying to sugarcoat things when we were having major issues.

Instead, I should have involved the team earlier, looked to collectively address things, and not tried to solve the major issues on my own.

I also made a lot of other mistakes, like the ones I mentioned in the article: How to Manage Up as an Engineer or a Manager: sending an email about potential improvements to my skip-level manager while not trusting my direct manager to handle those improvements, plus expected my new manager to change their working style because I was used to the working style of my previous manager.

All of that really doesn’t work, and I just ended up making our working relationship worse. So how can you manage successfully in all directions?

My top 3 tips are as follows:

• Build good relationships and good communication practices.

• Try to proactively find out the problems that people around you are facing and put in the effort to resolve them.

• Be transparent, give feedback, and ask for help when you need it.

Create a Positive Work Environment