Engineering Manager Skills To Help You Grow

Are you wondering whether you have the skills needed to become an engineering manager? Or maybe you are a seasoned engineer and now exploring management career path. In either case it’s important to know what are the top engineering manager skills in order to succeed.

Who is an Engineering Manager?

Engineers build awesome stuff. They are good at problem solving. To be a great engineer you need to have great technical depth and expertise, great problem solving skills and an aptitude to solve real world problems. People managers on the other hand are good on people skills. To be a great people manager you need to have exceptional people skills. Engineering managers are a hybrid between the two. They need to have good technical skills and judgement plus great people management skills. Engineering managers typically start their careers as engineers so it is almost guaranteed that they have technical engineering background. Engineers on the other hand almost never start their careers as people managers and they typically don’t have any people management related degree.

What Engineering Management is Not

Engineering management is not a guaranteed career growth path. Additionally, if you are a great engineer it is not guaranteed that you will be a great engineering manager. It certainly is not something you do to boss around and give orders to others. You can never be a good engineering manager if you don’t like dealing with people problems or helping people with their career growth. Here is my post on top 5 people manager mistakes.

Should I Become an Engineering Manager?

Answer the following questions to evaluate:

1. Are you passionate about helping people build their careers?
2. Are you willing to go above and beyond to help the employees you support even if that means sacrificing some of your own career goals?
3. Are you willing to continuously learn self-improvement skills?
4. Do you have the technical expertise to do the job of one of your direct reports if needed?
5. Are you willing to spend 80% or more of your time in helping or answering others and harnessing new meaningful relationships?
6. Are you committed to avoid all of the top people management mistakes mentioned here?
7. Last but not the least are you willing to have some direct conversations related to performance management and willing to manage out employees who are not meeting role expectations?

If you answers yes to all of the above questions then you should start moving to engineering management role NOW! There is no point in remaining an individual contributor when you can have much bigger impact as a manager. Think of it this way, would you prefer to be a $100 bill or a machine that can generate 100s of authentic $100 bills. If you answered no to any of the above questions then people management is probably not a good option for you now. You should continue as an IC and reevaluate after a few days. But before you start you should have answered yes to all of the above.