Leading Effective Engineering Teams

Chapter 7. Becoming an Effective Leader

In the previous chapter, I discussed everything about becoming an effective manager. I talked about managing people, projects, and your own time, among other things. Note the emphasis on the word managing. Management is about planning, organizing, and controlling the different parameters and resources to achieve set targets. Leadership, however, goes beyond traditional management tasks. You don’t need to formally become a manager to start leading a group of people.

From an organizational perspective, leadership involves mentorship, coaching, and setting a visionary course. It is about motivating and influencing people to work together instead of setting expectations about what they should and should not do. In software engineering, leaders inspire innovation, set the direction, and can emerge at any level of an organization, including the managerial level.

Let’s refer back to Chapter 3’s 3E’s model (enable, empower, and expand) for helping engineering leaders to instill effectiveness in their teams, departments, or organizations from the ground up. As a manager, you can enable effectiveness in your team by defining what effectiveness means in your context and facilitating the necessary steps, such as training and measurement, to initialize it. You can also empower your team to become effective by organizing the resources and support they need and removing blockers. However, to truly expand effectiveness by motivating people to want to become ...