The quest for an Engineering Manager

As an Engineering manager, The responsibility caters to both Technical aspect as well as Managerial aspect. We will be naturally good at technical as we already travelled in that path over certain period of time. Getting good at Managerial responsibilities requires time as well as good understanding of fundamentals.

When It comes to Managerial, I have often heard following very abstract but deep questions

1. Why do you say your team is high performing team?
2. How do you handle conflicts?
3. How do you ensure the timely deliverables?
4. What is your experience on delivering with tight schedules?
5. How to do you motivate the team?

Sounds familiar, you are not alone. Understanding the deep meaning / intention of this questions is not easy, because these are all highly ambiguous questions, different person would have different meaning to it based on their understanding level.

So I have listed down all the questions and read them again and again to understand the true meaning of it. And finally realised that all of these question boils down to the following simple fundamental questions

1. What is Team?
2. What makes the individual to come together and operates as single team?
3. What drives the team forward?

Basically “Team” means that group of individuals who has the shared convictions to do / achieve something. — The One Minute Manager.

I think this one fundamental deep definition pretty much answers all the questions. If we debrief the meaning of shared conviction it actually answers the following questions

1. What needs to be done?
2. Why it needs to be done?

If the Team has the answer to above questions then the question of How it needs to be done? will be easily figured out by the Team itself. No one needs to do extra work for that.

Then the next question raised to me was If the team can do everything since they know what needs to be achieved, What is the role of an Manager here?

To answer to my question I listed down what I have been really doing in office day to day and list goes as follows

1. Providing the necessary inputs to help the team to take decisions
2. Providing the necessary resources to operate.
3. Foreseeing the dependencies and assisting the team to tackle it.
4. Encouraging team to have flat and open communication, encourage one another.
5. Help the individuals to push the boundary of what he/she can do.
6. Set the growth direction for the individuals

If I really look at all these activities from birds eye view, all of these relates to meaning of

At what environment / culture the team operates?

From my above activities, I can see that The team operates in an environment where it gets constant

1. Support.
2. Necessary resources to get the job done.
3. Motivation to move forward / push the boundary.
4. High level of trust where one self doesn’t need to worry about being vulnerable.
5. Autonomous to operate independency and takes the informed decision.

So now what is the job of the manager now?, in a simple line

Creating an environment / culture where team can thrive to achieve the goal

Once I understood the fundamentals, I answering to the original questions listed in the first place is becomes so simple.

Why do you say your team is high performing team?

Because My team knows what needs to done, why its needs to be done, and how it helps the customer. Also they operate in the environment where they get constant support and motivation to push the boundaries and move forward resulting in delivering more values to the customer — which we call high performing team.

With this base line understanding of a Team, Answering the rest of the questions become simple. Try it yourself, post your answer in the comment below.

References:
I wouldn’t be able to connect these dots with out the help of following books and videos.

1. The One Minute Manager
2. Leading Effective Engineering Team
3. Five Dysfunctions of team
4. What Engineering Manager should do