Leading vs Managing: The Path to Growth as an Engineering Leader

Leading vs Managing: The Path to Growth as an Engineering Leader (Interview with Andras Fincza, VP of Engineering, Emarsys)

Becoming a leader of engineering managers is as big a jump as transitioning from engineer to management. You find an endless stream of tasks and solitude, and no one tells you what it means or what it takes to be successful.

In the latest episode of the Level-up Engineering podcast, Karolina Toth interviewed Andras Fincza, VP of Engineering at Emarsys, to discuss leading engineering managers compared to managing developers. He shared real insights and brutally honest moments from his experience as a tech leader to compare leading vs managing.

From this podcast episode and blog post, you will learn:

• Similarities between managing developers and leading engineering managers
• You should avoid micromanaging at all cost
• Aim to make yourself dispensable
• Differences between managing and leading
• Making decisions gets harder
• It's difficult to get direct information
• How to get direct information from developers as an executive engineering leader
• Utilize Skip Level 1-on-1 meetings
• Spend time with your teams
• How to transition from engineering management to leadership
• You can't please everyone
• Expect things to go wrong
• Leadership can get lonely
• Story of overcoming a burnout
• What new engineering leaders should do in their first 60 days
• 0. Watch, don't act
• 1. Build your communication channels
• 2. Build trust in your company
• 3. Keep learning
• How to build trust
• Use 1-on-1 meetings
• Be transparent
• Show vulnerability
• Characteristics of a great engineering manager
• Consistency
• Determination
• Self-reflection
• How to guide an engineering manager
• Coach them carefully
• How to evaluate the performance of your engineering managers
• Product delivery rate is a useful hard metric
• Look at soft metrics for the big picture
• How to evaluate your own performance as an executive leader
• Use feedbacks
• Use self-reflection
• Learn to give yourself credit
• About András Fincza

What are the similarities between managing developers and leading engineering managers?

You may lead a group of 6-8 people, but being responsible for another one hundred is the difference. There are a lot of similarities between managing and leading, it's the way you work that's different.

Avoid micromanaging

This is similar for managers and leaders, it's just more important for the latter. Managers shouldn’t micromanage their developers either, but micromanaging can be a dealbreaker once you become an engineering leader.

When managing managers, you should rely on other techniques to direct your people and to show them the way.

Be dispensable

It’s a good sign to be dispensable both for managers and leaders.

This means you've built a self-managed team that can be fully autonomous and work without your constant watch. To get there, you need to have succeeded in making space for people to challenge the processes and to come up with alternative solutions. This is the sign of psychological safety in a team.

I learned this from my missed opportunities and mistakes.

A personal story

I'll tell you a leadership story.

When I was a team leader, no one challenged my way of running the team. I wasn't unpopular, it was comfortable for everyone, but I was the go-to person for anyone outside the team. I attended architectural or product-related meetings because I wanted to move everything out of the way of my people so they could be efficient.

Doing this, I made myself a dependency for the team.

I only realized this was a mistake when I saw one of my engineering managers create an autonomous team, and I was jealous of him for that. Anyone from his team could represent the entire team in any meeting. He inspired me to do the same with my team of engineering managers.

The real differences are in the ways you make improvements for the people you’re responsible for.

What are the differences in leading vs managing?

Making decisions

As a team leader, it’s easy, but as an executive leader, you need to get support from everyone you’re responsible for to make a big decision. This means you have to convince everybody, especially your engineering managers, so they represent the decision to their people.

Problem: It’s difficult to get direct information

As a manager, I used to sit with my team and partake in everything they did. After I became an executive leader, I didn't have the privilege to sit down with all the people in my organization. I had an overview of the company, but that meant indirect information, so I couldn’t trust it.

I concluded that to be a good executive leader, I had to be on the field to get information.

Now, I keep up many connections with people. I proactively reach out to people beyond my team of engineering managers. I talk to developers, system engineers, and anyone I am responsible for indirectly.

Pro tip 1: Skip level 1-on-1 meetings

I like to do skip level meetings. When you talk to engineers directly, you can get to know your people better.

Good team leaders have to know their people. Learn their mood and their behavior, which allows you to make better decisions. As an executive leader, you can’t do this because there are too many people.

Knowing everyone’s name by heart is a must for me, even with a team of more than 100. I made it my goal to have anecdotes of everybody in my department. I think it helps them as well because these are usually shared stories, which may be a joint effort to solve a problem or just to have a beer together.

Even if I can’t do this with everyone, making the effort helps me build stronger human relationships with my people, so I can make better decisions as an executive leader.

Pro tip 2: Sit with your teams

The best thing for an executive leader is to find the time to sit with your teams and to spend a couple of days with them. You can do your usual work, but you get to see how they work and what problems they have with your own eyes. It’s hard for me to find the time for this, but I try, and I encourage my engineering managers who run 2-3 teams to sit with each team to better understand them.

What is the transition like from engineering management to a leadership role?

I knew it was going to be a roller coaster, like any time you transition from one role to another.

Things will go wrong

When I became head of Engineering, I felt I was successful with my team. I felt that I understood my engineering managers, I knew enough, I didn’t get in their way, I delegated, and everything went well. But if something goes wrong, it can derail everything.

It may be a change you make, a process you introduce or moving people around from one place to another because of tensions. The reaction you get from the organization can surprise you. Sometimes, you can't convince people, or you won't have time to convince everyone before implementing a change.

When people don't buy into your decision, your reflexes kick in to move fast and survive. Instinctively you start to micromanage, which is the worst thing you can do. You will be disappointed with the results, but it happens to everyone, and all you can do is to learn from this and try to avoid it next time.

You can’t please everyone

It’s essential to realize in an executive role that you can’t make everyone happy. You have to live this, but it's hard for me personally. I think I was prepared to deal with this, but I still had to learn to control my feelings about it.

Solitude comes with leadership

This surprised me; I didn’t see it coming.

Solitude is common for an executive leader. When you move from engineering management to leadership, you lose the close connection to your team that managers have.

Burning out on solitude

When I had been head of Engineering for half a year, I felt that I was just one step away from total burnout. I knew there was a problem, but I couldn't identify it.

I felt overwhelmed. I felt I couldn't finish anything. I didn't feel safe making decisions.

One night, in the midst of my agony, I started to write down all my duties, tasks, initiatives, and everything I couldn't finish. There were hundreds of items, and I put them into 20 categories and 80 subcategories. Then I buried my face in my hands, and the only thing I could think was, "What am I doing?"

It was insane.

I grabbed the list, and the next day, I reached out to my boss and mentor and asked to go out for a coffee or beer. He saw that I was upset, and I threw everything at him. The list, my feelings about it—I told him I was thinking of resigning because I couldn’t handle the pressure.

Only afterward did I realize how good a leader he was. He remained silent until I finished ranting, and then he asked me, "Why do you want to solve all this by yourself?"

I objected. "I delegate as much as I can, but the teams and managers are overwhelmed. There is no one else to do these tasks. I could throw out some to shrink my list, but I can’t do them all.”

This was the moment I realized how lonely I was in my role and how it paralyzed me. In turn, it also hurt my managers and their developer teams too. I also realized I didn’t have to be alone with my decisions.

Then I came up with the best idea I've ever had: I needed a team.

Building my new team

I had engineering managers, we did 1-on-1s and all that, but it wasn’t a real team. I needed a team that breathed together and made decisions together. The idea was to create a team of my managers.

I dropped my list and started with a blank page. I laid down the ground rules and organized meetings. We were trying to figure out what would be good for the company, and every member was excited to work together and share information with each other.

We’ve kept these processes ever since. We have a 90-minute meeting every week, where we share all the information about mood, people, culture, everything. We throw it all into the same bucket, then we choose some of them to focus on and make the decisions together.

This way, my managers can have a direct global impact on the organization. I’m responsible for their time, and I don't want to take too much away from their reports. But they have to represent themselves in these meetings while they help each other move forward.

It worked out

Since then, I feel safe making decisions. We have less organizational stress, and my decisions are backed up by my engineering managers. Additionally, I have arguments and reasons coming from C-level management, and the people they’re responsible for, so I can represent the entire organization better.

I don't know if there is a happy story of an engineering manager transitioning to leadership. I struggled a lot, but it was worth it, because I also learned a lot, especially about myself.

What should new engineering leaders do in their first 60 days?

I don't have a checklist, but I can give you some guidelines.

0. Don’t do anything, just watch

Avoid solving things early on. It's hard, because when you move into a leadership position, you want to prove yourself.

Stop instead, watch, learn, and feel the heartbeat of the organization or the lack of it. Don't visualize the best company or the perfect processes, but look at the existing culture. You need to forget your previous experiences, especially if you come from another company, and start understanding your current environment.

In the early days, you have to learn how things work around you and find the right areas to focus on. Whatever change you implement early on will be based on your previous experiences, and it’ll likely be counterproductive, especially if you push your decisions on people.

1. Build communication channels

You need information to be able to do your job well. You have to create communication channels and build up your social network in the organization. I like skip level 1-on-1 meetings and sitting with the teams for some time.

2. Build trust

Another crucial step you have to focus on, especially in the first days, is gaining trust. It’s key for an executive leader.

You need to earn the trust of your engineering managers, which also means you have to give them trust.

1-on-1 meetings

Doing 1-on-1s with your team is a good way to lay the foundation. A 1-on-1 meeting can be the place where you show the person behind the boss. You get to know the human side of your report, and you can share feedback as well.

It’s a safe place to ask for feedback, to give feedback, and to hold them accountable for things they said or did. You should also emphasize you’re accountable for what you say and do as well. A good 1-on-1 is a safe place for you both.

Watch the mood

If you carefully watch the mood of the organization, you can find red flags.

For example, if the engineering management introduces a new process, it can be a negative experience for people. It's up to me and my team of managers to show the opportunity in the change and convince the organization it’s for the best. So, if concerns stick around, it may signal performance problems for a manager.

This is how I measure the performance of my engineering managers.

How do you help your engineering managers improve when you see a problem?

We start a discussion about it to understand each other’s point of view. Sometimes, we don’t see the same things as problems. I'm open to listening to their reasoning, so they can convince me that they’re doing it right.

If I see that they have ownership of what they’re doing, and they’re passionate about a solution, I let them do it their way. Sometimes, they’re right, and they deliver great results; other times, it doesn’t work out. Then I expect them to learn from it and avoid it the next time, and since they have ownership, they’re sure to learn.

I give them space to come up with solutions and to make the mistakes that come with it.

How do you measure your own performance as an executive tech leader?

It’s similar to the way I measure the performance of my engineering managers.

I use feedback and self-reflection

I attribute my work to the delivery of the teams, so they can make me accountable for what I did, and I gather feedback on it. I use self-reflection; it’s always a good tool to measure your performance and success.

Recognize you play a part in everything

Often, it can be obvious to have success as an executive tech leader. The hard part is that you don’t see it because everything you do impacts the organization indirectly.

Anything the engineering management does, whether it was your idea or you just allowed your managers to make their ideas happen, you have to learn to attribute these to yourself too. Both the good and the bad.

Look at the success of the people around you, and find little things you can connect with. It’s essential to keep yourself sane. This is what I suggest to those who are in a similar role and unhappy about their performance.

About Andras Fincza

Andras has a master's degree in IT and started his career as a freelance engineer. Later, he became the co-founder of a fast-growing web development studio. He switched to Emarsys, went back to software engineering, and learned about its engineering culture.

He became part of senior leadership, and he’s currently VP of Engineering at Emarsys. Because of this, he doesn’t attend stand-up meetings holding a baseball bat anymore.

As an executive leader, his mission is to take care of the emerging culture and to keep the development processes agile to improve efficiency and overall quality. To fulfill this mission, he’s leading a group of engineering managers, and he's passionately working on Emarsys Craftlab.