When you’ve worked your way up in a company and are presented with the opportunity to take an engineering management role, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to contemplate what the position entails.
The thought of managing a team and a project can be thrilling, overwhelming, exciting and provoke fear all at the same time. Being an engineering manager means taking on more responsibility and being able to make a significant impact in your field.
The reality is – being an engineer vs. being the manager of an engineering team are completely different roles. It is important to understand the differences between the roles and how they can impact your short-term and long-term career goals.
“Your job is going to change radically when you transition from being and engineer to being an engineering manager.”
Here are some key insights from engineers who have successfully made the move to management roles:
1. Prepare for a dramatic change in career path.
In an engineering role, you are in change of developing technology. In a management role, you must also focus on the technology, but you are also now mostly responsible for people. As far as your career options go, there will always be more demand for individual contributing engineers than for engineering managers. However, good engineering managers are hard to come by, so if you hone your skills in the area of management, you can open vastly new paths that would not be possible if you didn’t get into the management strata.
2. You are no longer a “hands-on” employee
Your primary responsibility as a manager is to enable your team to succeed. This means leaving behind the activities that gave you satisfaction as an engineer. If your task was coding, you likely won’t be doing much of that once you start leading a team. Your knowledge of coding will be essential to guide your team and review their output. However, people often need time to adjust to the new priorities in their careers as managers.
More time will be taken up with setting strategy for the team, communicating with stakeholders, unblocking bottlenecks, and managing people’s careers. Once you make the transition to this new scope of responsibilities, it can ultimately be more fulfilling that the focus you used to have on code, design, testing, or whatever your role was as an engineer.
3. Managers are more like coaches
Sports provides a good analogy for this point – when you are an engineer, you’re often thinking about yourself in relation to the team. Being an MVP is something that engineering often strive for in order to be selected for the most rewarding and innovative projects.
As a manger, you are coaching the team, and are less focused on your accomplishments as an individual. Coaches win accolades, too, but only when the team does exceptionally well.
4. Think Longer-Term
Whether you are coding or designing parts for a new vehicle – there are often milestones that create a very concrete sense of completion throughout a project. The “wins” in which you are doing different things within the scope of a project create many instances of gratification in your work.
As a manager, you are no longer doing things in this fine-grained manner. You are in the mode of making things happen. And this can take months or years, depending on the scope of the projects you are managing. Working within this delayed gratification environment can take time to adjust to and will take time to learn how to motivate yourself differently. When gratification does come, it is the result of a longer time horizon that you used to experience – but that can make the “win” even sweeter.
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