The Engineering Leader

Section 2 Summary

Congratulations! You are now the manager of yourself.

Wait…this was always true. But hopefully, whatever the org chart says, and however great your manager is (or isn’t), you have some new tools to help you be effective and evolve your style and role.

In Chapter 5, “Energy Management”, we talked about shifting your mindset to focus on managing energy rather than time, avoiding energy-draining activities (and running around after everyone!), and navigating and extracting yourself and others from a place of burnout.

In Chapter 6, “Defining and Adapting Your Role”, we talked about what your role is, what you need to get from your manager (or elsewhere) to be effective, and how to start getting strategic when it comes to managing a team. We also talked about implicit feedback—what it is and where to find it—and how to approach evolving your role over time.

In Chapter 7, “Expanding Your Leadership Range”, we talked about defaults and strengths, controlling weaknesses, and how to improve our effectiveness by identifying our strengths, controlling or mitigating our weaknesses, and paying less attention to our saboteurs. We covered the different leadership styles, when they work best, and how to find opportunities to try them out.

This is the end of the first half of the book, the part where we focus on you. Next, we will move on to the teams you support and how you make them more functional and more effective. In this section, we talked about identifying what you need ...