Leadership as a Staff-plus Engineer
More complex projects get derailed by personal conflict than by technical complexity. Partnering with your manager is better than disappointing them when you need to meet your expectations. The most exact sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized.
Nothing destroys trust faster than surprising your manager. Feed your manager’s context. Managing up is about increasing bandwidth and reducing friction between you and your manager. If you’re deliberate, you can influence your organization’s leaders over time. Still, you’ll only get that time if you learn to remain in tight alignment at each step. Miscommunication creates latency rather than errors. Writing forces you to think about your beliefs and data. Write everything down. You need to maintain a positive and productive relationship with your manager. Never shock your supervisor. Sudden surprises can shatter your manager’s trust and respect for you, resulting in a complete and utter loss of faith. This requires understanding what they want from this change and how they’ll feel when they get there. Rather than relying on any individual, a more significant impact can be made on a company’s long-term success. They are investing in its engineers’ development through Mentorship and guidance. The increased administrative authority provides new tools for solving problems. Retaining an executive officer in a well-managed organization requires much nuance and restraint.
The duties of a Staff-plus engineer vary according to the team’s needs and the Engineer’s strengths. I am most effective when I can provide direction and guidance in setting a technical vision for an area. When you reach a higher position in an organization, you must focus on the needs of the business over your own needs. Technology cannot promote itself and needs dedicated advocates advocating on its behalf. Companies either learn to explore or fade away. The highest-paid roles at any company are executive and senior management. You don’t have to spend so much energy putting your credentials on the table when you have a title. Although you won’t be writing a lot of code, you’ll still need to read a great deal of your colleagues’ code and complete many code reviews. Determining what work is in any role depends on the level of communication and commitment of the individual. Yet, Staff Engineers often follow a similar work pattern across organizations. If you need to track your projects as a Staff Engineer, it’s easy to catch yourself doing little to no high-impact work. In senior roles, you’re more likely to self-determine what you pay attention to with minimal or no management guidance. Understanding how things ought to work is robust. Yet, you need to blend your vision with the visions of leadership and peers. Focus on what matters to make the most of your working hours, particularly as you get further along in your career and life’s commitments expand. Stay aligned with authority to remain an effective leader over time.
As a senior leader, you must maintain a hold on your ego to avoid investing in meaningless work on a grand scale. Create space for others so that your team grows stronger than your contribution. Build a network of peers to vet difficult decisions and give honest feedback when your role’s authority starts to temper feedback.
