I failed…I did all the work myself, pushed my team aside and set deadlines for them without consulting them.

Years back, I was promoted to a leadership position for the first time. I had been at this company as an engineer for a while. Years in fact. The first large project my team had to deliver, I failed them. I did all the work myself.

I had wanted a leadership position for a year at that point. My whole career I have viewed working my way up the ladder as a sign that I was good at my chosen career. My whole career I have suffered from imposter syndrome. I always seemed to find myself surrounded by brilliant colleagues, I never felt good enough to be working with them. I felt like a bit of a fraud, I also felt lucky. Climbing the ladder for me was always a way to shut that part of me up. Temporarily at least.

So when I was given the chance of being an Engineering Manager for the first time I wanted it so badly, I wanted to feel vindicated from the other part of me that would tell me I wasn’t good enough. That drove me. I dove headfirst into all aspects; management, roadmaps, project delivery, team strategy, everything. I didn’t give myself a chance to breathe. Straight in, head first. No oxygen tank.

Quickly after being given the role, our team had been given our first big project. We had to implement a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML) model to process blocks of text in order to detect the sentiment of the text. In other words, the business problem was that the Customer Success team wanted an automated way of being able to detect whether a block of text was positive, negative or neutral. Based on this, other business logic would happen to make sure the customer ended up with the right person who could help them best. This is something I had built the foundation of as an engineer.

I wanted to impress on this project. I wanted to make sure we delivered it ahead of any expectations, bug free and exceeding all requirements. I viewed this as my chance to really earn my keep, really show them why they promoted me. I would be vindicated.

I set to work straight away. I created the Tech Spec, organised the Jira Epics + stories and tasks. I estimated each milestone, set an estimated delivery date and took 2 weeks off that to impress. I did all the architecture diagrams and wrote detailed notes about how each ticket should be implemented. I then sent my stakeholders updates with a delivery plan.

This was all a mistake. I played myself and I failed my team.

I gave my team no ownership. I ensured that all the knowledge about this system would live and die with me. I gave them no accountability. I took a chance to work on some pretty cool software away from them. Sure, they worked on it. They didn’t get a chance to engineer it. That’s 3/4 of the fun. I gave them no exposure to stakeholders and senior leadership by letting them do the updates.

A good engineering manager, would have worked with their team instead and guided them into a good architecture, delivery plan, stakeholder update and helped them work out how they can deliver this as a team and have fun whilst doing so. A good engineer manager would have protected their team to give them the freedom to do their best work, over-estimate, and make the right decisions together.

As a result of me knocking two weeks off my delivery estimate to show off, I was really against it. I certainly wasn’t going to ask my team to work overtime to deliver this. This was all me. That month, I have never worked so many hours. My failure was not about to become my teams failure to own.

In the end it was delivered, it was delivered in the eyes of the stakeholders; early with no issues. That came at a price. That price was my team working out very early that they had a manager and not a leader. It took me a while to over come that and I like to think that if you asked my current team, they would be quite shocked reading this.

As an Engineer Manager your role is to guide and not decide.

Imagine you are bowling as a manager. You need to let you team bowl their game. Your job is to put the bumpers up to ensure you guide them generally in the right direction.