Agile Learning Labs

IEEE Group Answers: "What makes an engineering manager great?"

Last night the San Francisco / Silicon Valley IEEE Technology Management Council met to examine the question: "What makes an engineering manager great?" Nearly 30 people participated. Over 40 good ideas were presented and considered. In the end the group ranked the following skills, attributes, and behaviors most important.

It is interesting to compare these results with those that two other groups generated here. Also interesting is how similar these results are to those generated by a group considering the most important things a technical manager can do to retain key contributors, which can be found here. While there are common themes that run through each group's responses, the results are far from identical. This makes sense to me. Each group is unique, and has different values and needs. There is no 'One True Way' to be a great manager. Certainly there are core skills and knowledge, but to rise to the level of greatness requires really understanding the group to be led, and giving them what they need.

Tier One
Integrity
Enthusiastic & inspiring
Praise & reward
Listen well
Ask questions rather than give orders
Clear communication
Have a vision
Interpersonal skills
Respect staff input

Tier Two
Appreciates the service of others
Team builder
Honesty
Build consensus
Know each staff member's strengths and weaknesses

Tier Three
Recognize individuals, share blame
Big picture knowledge
Focus on fixing, not on blame
Ability to prioritize
Engender ownership
Clear goals

To learn more about the San Francisco / Silicon Valley IEEE Technology Management Council click here.

IEEE Presents: What Makes Engineering Managers Succeed?

Have you worked for a great manager? What were the qualities that made him or her stand out from the rest? Share your experience and tap into the collective wisdom that will be present. We will uncover the most important qualities and skills for a technical manager to posses.

Tonight (Wednesday, January 30), I will be facilitating this workshop for the IEEE San Francisco / Silicon Valley Technology Management Council. The event is open to the public, and will be held at the Ramada Silicon Valley. Details here.

Retaining Key Contributors - Results

Last night a dozen technical leaders gathered for the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group to answer the question:

"What are the most effective steps a manager can take to retain key employees?"

The following guidelines where provided:

• Consider this question from your own personal experience.
• What were the things that kept you?
• What effective measures did you take to retain people?
• What things could have been done to keep you: "If only my manager had...I would have stayed."

We used the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink technique to capture the experience and wisdom of the whole group. More than twenty ideas were generated and discussed. Each idea was given a short name, and posted on the wall. The group then ranked the ideas, based on their own real-world experience. The exercise took an hour.

Here are the results. Some of the names, such as "Giving Credit..." mean pretty much what you would think. Others, "Empowerment" for example, represent the groups best effort at summing up a much more in-depth and detailed idea. The ideas are presented as ranked by the group. I have left out a number of ideas that were considered but ultimately not selected by the group.

Tier One
Empowerment
Giving Credit, Recognition Both Public and Private
Create an Enjoyable Work Environment

Tier Two
Be a Buffer Between Senior Management
Willingness to Actually Lead
Proactive Problem Resolution
Tolerate Failure
Compensation

Tier Three
Clear Shared Vision
Mentoring for Professional Growth
Prioritize to Prevent Waste
Respect

Tier Four
Training
Match Interests to Roles
Be Accessible
Provide Tools for Success
Regular Performance Reviews

Looking at the results, I am struck by how similar they are to the results that have come from workshops that have sought to identify the qualities of a great manager. Results from some of those can be found here. This seems to support the idea that people stay or leave based primarily on their relationship with their manager.

Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I offer one-on-one coaching for engineering managers, as well as several workshops to help engineering managers succeed:
Managing Technical People
Coaching and Mentoring
Delivering Effective Feedback
Makings of a Great Technical Manager
and many more!

Pay for Performance Hard to Get Right

I found this interesting article on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site. It examines 13 pay-for-performance programs that various groups in HP tried and dropped. There are lessons to be learned from these experiences.

What gets incented gets done, at the expense of the rest of the stuff. Think about the side effects of any incentive program. Giving extra pay for outstanding individual accomplishments is not going to encourage teamwork, for example.

Manage expectations; better to start with goals that are too high than too low. If management finds that fewer people than expected are able to perform up to the incented level, it is a simple matter to adjust the level down a bit next cycle. If, however, more people than expected make it the first cycle, they are likely to cry 'Foul!' when management adjusts the levels up next time.

Creativity and learning are tough to incent with a pay-for-performance program. Such programs tend to reward 'success' and results, not experimentation, trial and error.

I agree that these programs can be hard to get right, and are costly when they are done wrong. In management, as in engineering, it is often the hardest things that are most valuable. Pay-for-performance is a tool. It is management's job to decide if it is the right tool.

My First Week at Geekaplex: Integrating a New Hire

My friend Peter started working at EvilEmpireSoft on the same Monday that I started at Geekaplex. That Friday, over beers, he told me that he had spent most of his first week waiting for his laptop to show up. When it finally showed up, it had an outdated version of the development environment installed which couldn't compile the code he was supposed to be working on. On top of that, Outlook was misconfigured and wouldn't even think about connecting to the mail server. He spent an afternoon figuring out the configuration only to discover that his email account hadn't been activated yet! "It's as if they were surprised when I showed up for work on Monday. Maybe they forgot that they hired me? I spent the first morning waiting in HR until someone was available to give me paperwork to fill out. After that," he went on, "I spent the afternoon wandering around looking for an empty cube to claim."

I felt bad for Peter, and I was almost embarrassed at how different my first week had gone. My office was just down the hall from my boss's. There was no mistaking that it was mine, as my name was on the plaque next to the door. Inside, I found a shinny new ThinkPad with a docking station and a pair of flat-screen monitors. The drawers in the desk were filled with new pens, pencils, paper, a stapler, and even a box of freshly printed business cards. My boss sat down with me and walked me through my first week, pointing out the various meetings and training sessions that were already on my calendar. There was even a welcome email from the president of the company waiting in my in-box.

"Wow!" Said Peter, "You're like a VIP over there! I feel like most folks don't know I exist, and if they do, they are just hoping that I won't bother them. It really sucks. EvilEmpireSoft seemed so cool and together when I interviewed, but now I'm wondering how they get anything done. They aren't the elite, well-oiled organization that I imagined them to be. I feel like I made a big mistake accepting their offer."

What a big difference attention to detail and a little preparation made. By simply taking the time to provision my office, my boss sent me a strong positive message about the company, and how much they valued me. Additionally, by making sure that I had all the tools I needed to be productive, they let me know that they expected me to be productive. I felt like Geekaplex had it together, and that they would expect me to have it together as well. I felt welcomed and challenged.

The Most Important Qualities for an Engineering Manager to Possess

Last night, the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group examined the question “What are the most important qualities for an engineering manager to possess?” Each person was asked to answer the question based on their own experiences as a direct report. We went looking for the qualities that separated our best managers from the rest.

We used the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to gather ideas, and then we sorted the results using Decision Optimizing Tiny Stickies (DOTS or Dot Voting). The result was a tiered list of valuable qualities, with 'tier one' being those that the group felt were most important.

A few days prior, I had run the same exercise with a different group. I’ll call them “Group X”. Below are the results from each.

September Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group

Tier One
Delegation
Understand the product and the critical path

Tier Two
Establishes team culture
Takes ownership

Tier Three
Buffer between engineers and management
Strong decision-maker
Understand and communicate the business

Tier Four
Found ways for everyone to contribute
Good connector
Managing requirements
Plots the course to success
Runs good meetings

Tier Five
Always prepared
Available as a resource
Contingency planning
Good listener
Holds each person accountable for deliverables
Manages information flow
Motivator
Respected in the company
Sense of humor

Group X

Tier One
Smart

Tier Two
Finds ways for me to contribute
Gives constructive feedback
Goal and result oriented, not process oriented
Invites discussion
Mentor
Principled

Tier Three
Acknowledge the need for career growth
Budget conscious
Can Delegate
Grows people and promotes from within
Honest, trusted
Inspires me to believe in myself
Sets clear expectations
Shields me from BS
Team builder

Tier Four
Available, always has time for me
Believes in me
“Can do!” attitude
Clear communicator
Compassionate
Decisive and firm
Forthright, tells me what they really think
Good listener
Has my back
Humor
Lead by example
Not heavy-handed
Passion
Values learning

SDForum SEM Sig

I spent the evening at the SDForum Software Engineering Management Special Interest Group (SEM Sig) meeting. The room was filled with engineering managers of almost every type and experience level. The presenter tonight was Narinder Sandhu, who worked at HP and Intuit before founding T-Rex Global. He managed to get everyone in the room to do a basic skills-assessment and career action plan, as part of his presentation comparing large companies to small startups.

After the formal presentation, the informal discussions were amazing. I talked with people about things as diverse as: finance, feedback, agile development, a mathematical model for organizational structures, and C vs. Lisp vs. Verilog! Oh yes, I’ll be back.

Managers Support Group – Report

“It’s so great to hear that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem!” said one engineering manager after another had shared a problem they were having getting non-technical upper management to understand the time and complexity issues of software development.

The discussion was lively and time ran out long before we had covered all the topics that had come up. The topics discussed included:

• Finding time to ‘get work done’ amidst constant interruptions
• Protecting the team’s work flow from outside interruption and meddling
• Finding focus, how to choose what to pursue and what to let go
• Dealing with ill-defined goals
• Dealing with morale busting bureaucracy and ‘HR’ influence

The night started out with a mini-workshop in which the participants took a hard look at the reasons meetings get called and identified the good from bad, from the ugly. As Socrates taught me, every meeting should have a goal that is:

• Measurable, obvious when met
• Attainable
• Understood and shared by all
• Meaningful, has clear benefit

When a group meets around such a goal:

• The meeting has focus
• The meeting can be short; no need to drone on after the goal is met
• Attendance tends to improve
• Attentiveness tends to improve
• Attitudes and morale tend to improve

Next month we will have a new mini-workshop and more discussion and group support for the issues that you are facing every day. Join our meetup group!

Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group

You are invited to join the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group.

Share the adventures and challenges of managing engineers. Each session will start with a short presentation on a topic of interest to technical managers. After that comes a facilitated discussion where participants can share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free. Food and beverages are available for purchase from out host restaurant. Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.

Our first meetup will be held on Tuesday June 19th at 7:00 PM. We will meet in the event room at Hobees 4224 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA. You can RSVP by leaving a comment on this blog post or by joining our event on meetup.com

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A Different Kind of Tolerance in the Workplace

Dannyman pointed out this quote from William L. McKnight, past Chairman of the Board at 3M.

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it's essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

This idea applies to the manager leading a small team, not just to the CEO. While giving guidance is necessary, controlling all aspects of how your team members work is not. Nobody wants to be micro-managed.

The other bit in there is tolerating mistakes. There are two broad categories of ‘mistakes’ that your people will make. The first type isn’t really a mistake at all, though you will think it is. They will choose to do things differently than you would. Very often, our instinct is that different is wrong, or at the very least, not as good as the way we would do the thing. After all, you are the manager, the leader, and the expert. Right? Remember all the times your boss wanted you to do things some way that was clearly not as good as the way you wanted to? Now that you are a leader, work hard not to be that boss.

The second type of mistake that your people will make is a mistake. It can be hard to tell this type of mistake from the first kind until the results are in. When these mistakes happen, err on the side of tolerance. Help the person to examine the mistake and learn from it, in a way that is supportive. Good people don’t like to fail. The pain of the failure will be punishment enough for them.