What comes to mind when you hear the words "career development for managers"?

If you're like me, it's one of two things: either obsessive ladder-climbing or those awful mandatory "trainings" that get hastily assembled to teach 27 year olds not to hit on their interviewees.

Name any one of your (justified) complaints about engineering roles, levels, interviews, etc, and I'll bet the same can be said for engineering management -- but way worse.

Engineering at least has some studyable base skills. For management that's called "being alive."

To be fair, you can (and should!) work very hard on being alive better, your entire life! Skills like communication, empathy, discipline and self mastery, emotional self-regulation, self awareness, and self-acceptance are a huge part of being an effective leader (or...person).

But let's say you know all that. You're a manager, and you're wondering how to grow as one.

(Aside: woo, lots of responses already! I am walking and thumb-typing my stream of thought so I can't read them, but what a tasty treat for after! )

1) "I totally support women/lgbt/PoC in tech, but it's not as bad as all that; it can't be, or I would have seen it myself by now. Plus there two sides to every story."

-- if that sounds like you, please don't become anyone's manager until you have done a LOT of learning.

It's one thing to be unaware of power dynamics and structural inequities as an IC, and another when you wield formal hiring and firing powers on behalf of the org.

You can really fuck people up that way, and you'll get no points for pleading ignorance over malice.

oops.. gotta go

TO BE CONTINUED

BACK NOW

resuming thread (on "career development for managers")

2) Get you some peers. You need a personal circle of other managers for mutual support, swapping stories, and talking through tricky interpersonal scenarios with strict confidentiality.

I enjoyed my peer circle as an engineer. I couldn't survive without them as a manager.

It can take some time to amass the right trusted circle, and it will shift with time, as some connections drift away and new ones emerge. Building, nurturing, and curating your circle is a continuous bg process.

And it's the #1 thing you can do for your managerial career.

Don't let the fact that you went to college fool you. Our professions are passed along and moved forward by a web of apprenticeships.

Which is why you should be extra generous with your time; everything you learned came from someone else.

3) Teach, explain, tell stories about your own successes and failures as a manager. Helping somebody else with their problem has a way of helping you take a fresh look at your own lessons, and they become more firmly engrained.

4) If public speaking terrifies you, lean into that fear and crush it. Verbal fluency in front of a group is a learnable skill.

As a manager, you will draw on this skill ten times a day -- running efficient meetings, holding people's attention, representing your team well, etc

I've talked about this before, but I used to be catastrophically terrified of speaking, even to my own coworkers. I would wake up from nightmares in a cold sweat for weeks leading up to a small internal talk.

If all else fails, try chemistry. Propranolol worked great for me.

5) Get a therapist. Get a work coach too, if work will pay for it. Yes, it's good to work on your self-awareness, your relationship patterns, etc, but I also just find it super useful to learn new language and descriptive phrases from people who do this for a living.

If you're reluctant to do this, ask yourself honestly, could you use some better coping mechanisms and tools for emotional regulation?

Such a huge part of being a manager is making sure you don't turn your problems or your feelings into other people's problems. And that's HARD.

6) Here's a big one, which I am really reluctant to mention. But if you really want to accelerate your career as a manager and learn lots of core skills fast: consider going to work at a google/fb/amazon, or any large and relatively faster-paced tech company.

I learned so, so, so much about management (and organizational politics, and bureaucracies, and formal and informal power structures) at Facebook.

None of it was shit I *wanted* to learn, mind you, but in retrospect it turned out to be pretty darn invaluable.

These big tech companies have their flaws, but they aren't stupid, and they have invested in a lot more into sophisticated business operations than any startup.

Managing a team there for a year is a killer crash course in the best practices & defaults of engineering management.

Startups get away with so, so, so much sloppy behavior from a management and human resources perspective.

If you can't or won't go work for a big company, try Will Larson's book "An Elegant Puzzle", which outlines a lot of the same best practices and the reasons behind them.

7) If you hate confrontation, I'm sorry honey, but you have to push through that barrier asap. Read "Radical Candor", practice with your therapist, practice with your group of peers, whatever it takes, but you have got to learn to lean into that itchy feeling and open your mouth.

8) Learn to have better, more interesting, more fulfilling, more varied 1x1s with your reports. This is a tough one for introverts, but it's super worth investing some curiosity, research, asking around with other managers, etc.

9) Run better meetings. This is a platinum level skill that is nearly invisible in the hands of a master -- you usually only notice it when meetings are being run poorly.

Train yourself to notice when it's being done well, and copy the hell out of those meeting runners

10) Figure out how high-performing your team is (start with the DORA metrics) and evaluate how much time is being wasted and consumed by wheel-spinning due to inefficiencies in your core sociotechnical feedback loops.

Anyone who calls themselves a technical leader, whether engineer or manager, shares responsibility for identifying, maintaining, and optimizing those feedback loops. They are at the heart of how your organization delivers value and becomes a place people want to work.

Step back from fighting at all the symptoms and pathologies; try to fix them at the source.

This may involve:
- staying up to date on technical news
- getting your hands dirty and tinkering from time to time
- talking to others in the org to identify shared pain

- learning what really motivates each person on your team
- crafting a pitch that excites them and pushes their boundaries
- breaking down massive technical debt into bite sized initiatives
- knowing when to speak and when to shut up
- doling out strategic praise

And finally 11) Put your hand up and volunteer for things. Is there a new job ladder that needs to be written, or revised? Does the on call schedule need refactoring? Has anyone checked to make sure salaries are fair and not biased by race or gender?

This has been a not terribly well organized scrapbook of advice on career development for managers.

But I hope it speaks to what I am angling for, which is 1) managing is not about titles+promotions and 2) you have to steer your own career and be learning constantly.

If all you do is gallop up the org chart to be a VP or C level asap, I shall look at you sideways and wonder if you really enjoy your work, or if you have any idea whether you enjoy it or not; and suspect I am violently allergic to the way you practice and impose hierarchy.

And there is one final pitfall I want to draw a big red circle around, which is the tendency for managers to grow in ways that are useful TO THE ORG but useless outside of it.

Those aren't skills. That isn't what I mean by career development. Be a little more selfish.