Recently, I read a quote from Will Larson – a recognized engineering leader of Strip, Carta, and Uber – “One of the biggest lessons in management over the last decade is that micromanagement is bad. But I think this is an anti-pattern, because it creates disengaged and context-free leadership, and leadership can be so much more than that.” Those words resonated with me greatly.
Breaking it down: “micromanagement is bad”. I’ve heard this time and time again. I have struggled with managing deep and managing light and finding a balance where my team doesn’t feel like I’m smothering them, but allows me to stay engaged. It’s tough.
The next one, “disengaged and context-free leadership” is what happens when you’ve got amazing leaders under you and you trust them explicitly and use that to go do other cool things. You end up doing a lot of really interesting work that moves the company forward – such as proposals, pitch decks to other teams, evaluating new technologies or new partnerships, thinking of the next curve in tech – but it is so easy to rely on your amazing leaders to manage the daily execution to where you don’t really understand what’s going on from an organizational level.
Finally, “leadership can be so much more than that” is really key. Your role as a leader is to know what’s going on in your org: the roses and the thorns; it’s even to help guide the teams into new ways of thinking to solve their own problems and celebrate their successes. It’s to be the ambassador to the other parts of the org; not shielding them from the realities but educating both the org and the other leaders (including the CEO) how engineering really works.
As an engineering leader with 25 years of hard-earned experience without reading management books, I actually appreciate how Larson’s words echo my own experiences and give me a clarity in the written word to better convey them. This is one of the reasons I’m writing these blog posts: to do a better job of distilling my experiences into words and concepts that I can talk to publicly with others. By sharing these reflections, I hope to connect with fellow engineering leaders and spark meaningful conversations about how we can better balance engagement and empowerment in our teams.