Where should you focus on?
Hey friend,
I'll be in Brussels, Belgium next week giving a talk on one of my favourite topics: Engineering Manager Roadmap. Here is the thing, this talk was a hit at TorontoJS Meetup so I'm quite excited to give it again.
On top of this, I was invited to be part of the first 4 speakers of the conference which I felt really honoured. So, naturally I chose to speak about Engineering Leadership Roadmap.
Since you may or may not be in Brussels, let me share a 3-step framework with you that I will be sharing with the conference attendees.
As you decide to become an Engineering Manager or a Leader, you will be in either of these 3 categories and I call this a 3-step framework:
- Get Curious
- Get Going
- Get Confident
🙊 Step 1: Get Curious
At step 1, your only objective is to get started with your Leadership journey. It doesn’t matter how bad you are to begin with, you just need to know what it takes to become a Leader. Just start leading by finding opportunities.
Here you will focus on building foundations and learning what expectations are like from you.
👏 Step 2: Get Going
At step 2, the objective is to get good at Leadership, whether that’s leading smaller teams, learning to set expectations, coaching people and starting to learn how to build high-performing teams.
The way we do this is by first focusing on building your craft, as the more we lead the better we’ll naturally get at what we’re doing (i.e. our quality increases too). Over time, we can begin focusing more heavily on the quality, but only once we’ve had a certain level of quality already.
Here you will focus on delivering constructive feedback, coaching folks, learning the tools necessary to grow folks at all levels and what it takes to build a high-performing team.
😎 Step 3: Get Confident
At step 3, the objective here is to understand and optimise our Leadership practices by looking at the principles and tools that help us to grow, and build scalable teams.
Now that you want to get more confident, here, you will build a strategy and a vision for your team, get involved in hiring & interviewing as well as Creating a Technical Excellence Strategy with your team alongside honing your craft.
Now whether you are at Step 1, 2 or 3, Developer to Leader ↗️ will help you get there.
Before you go, I have 2 questions for you.
- Where do you see yourself in the above 3-step framework?
- What is stopping you from achieving your goals?
🧰 The Engineering Leader's Toolbox
- 🎁 Playbook for Building a Effective Technical Excellence Strategy, Download here ↗️
- What's your Unfair Advantage as a Developer & a Leader? Use this framework to find out ↗️
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