The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 17. Inspected Trust

The path to becoming an Engineering executive used to start with the transition from writing software as a software engineer to serving in a hybrid software engineer/people management role. That role was typically called tech lead manager, and combined being the team’s senior-most technical contributor along with fulfilling the team’s people management duties. Many folks struggled with that transition and fell back onto the familiar habit of technical leadership to avoid the discomfort of developing the new skills necessary to succeed in people management.

Since then, the industry has attempted to solve that challenge by decoupling technical and people leadership into distinct roles. Today, it’s common for first-time managers to get the advice that they should immediately stop writing code at work. Writing code, the argument goes, is a distraction from the more important work of learning to manage a team. In this world, managers should step back from their team’s work and focus on being people managers. This advice is summarized into one short phrase that most managers get early in their management career: “Trust your team.”

This advice is almost correct, which is why it’s so easy to misapply. What managers—and executives—truly need isn’t unquestioning trust but inspected trust, which is a trust-but-verify approach. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• How executives may rely too heavily on trust, and how that undermines their leadership

• Why trust isn’t ...