The Engineering Leader

Chapter 9. Making People Successful

Back in Section 1, “DRIing Your Career”, we talked about the importance of finding situations where you could grow. In Section 2, “Self-Management”, we talked about understanding your job and setting yourself up for success. We approached these from the angle of needing to meet your own needs, in part by managing up. In this section we’re going to take the other angle on this—managing down: how you help people understand their job and set them up for success.

We’ll cover one of the most powerful levers for doing this: effective 1:1s. Not as a list of questions (although those can be useful) but as developing a model of what effective 1:1s look like. We’ll also look at onboarding and understanding what makes a successful onboarding, as well as how to manage people through challenging periods, whether they are struggling personally or with their job.

Of course, there are those people who get into management because they are driven by power and advancement. But many managers get into it because they like helping people and want both teams and individuals to be better. They have good intentions. Although I do believe you can get a surprisingly long way as a manager by consistently showing up and giving a damn about the person as a human being, good intentions can only take you so far. In hard situations, the intentions you have will not matter in the face of the impact of failing to handle them effectively.

The worst manager I ever had failed in ...