Welcome to the seventh installment in our social skills series for engineers! We’ve explored engineers’ “weird” personality traits, mastered small talk, learned to read social cues, built networking strategies. learned how to explain complex concepts to non-technical audiences, and improved our ability to handle criticism. Now we’re continuing the series to discuss what technical folks need to know as they move into management.

Engineers can make fantastic managers. By applying your systems thinking, you can handle anything. Learn how in this post!

The Great Migration: From Doing to Leading

So you’ve been promoted. After years of slinging code, optimizing algorithms, and wrestling with technical problems, the powers that be have decided you should now… manage people? What fresh hell is this?

If you’re like most engineers who’ve made this transition, you’re experiencing an emotion that falls somewhere between “I’ve finally been recognized for my brilliance” and “Dear God, they’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Let me be the first to tell you: both reactions are completely normal. And also completely irrelevant to your success moving forward.

Why Engineers Often Struggle with Leadership (It’s Not Your Fault… Mostly)

The skills that made you an exceptional engineer are not the same ones that will make you an exceptional leader. In fact, some of them might actively work against you:

  • Problem-solving reflex: As an engineer, when someone brings you a problem, your instinct is to solve it immediately. As a leader, your job is often to help others solve it themselves.

  • Binary thinking: Engineering problems often have correct and incorrect solutions. People problems rarely do.

  • Optimization mindset: Engineers optimize for efficiency. Leadership sometimes requires inefficient paths for the sake of growth, morale, or long-term strategy.

  • Introversion as a superpower: That deep focus that made you great at coding? It might make you miss crucial social cues in meetings.

One engineering director I worked with put it perfectly: “I spent the first month of leadership trying to fix everyone’s problems. By month two, I was drowning. By month three, I realized my job wasn’t to be the human StackOverflow for my team.”

The Leadership Tech Stack You Actually Need

Just as you wouldn’t try to build a modern web app without the right frameworks, don’t try to lead without these essential tools:

1. Expectation Management Framework

The most common cause of team dysfunction isn’t technical incompetence—it’s mismatched expectations. You need a reliable system for:

  • Setting clear, measurable objectives
  • Establishing realistic timelines (and yes, that means padding estimates—I see you wincing)
  • Creating explicit definitions of “done”

Pro tip: After explaining an expectation, ask team members to repeat it back in their own words. The delta between what you said and what they heard can be… educational.

2. Feedback Loop Architecture

Engineers love feedback loops in systems—now apply that thinking to people:

  • Regular 1:1s: These aren’t status updates; they’re relationship-building opportunities
  • Project retrospectives: What went well? What didn’t? What can we improve?
  • Performance reviews: Document accomplishments year-round (your memory is worse than you think)

Remember: Feedback should be like unit tests—specific, actionable, and frequent enough to catch issues early.

3. Decision-Making Algorithm

As a leader, you’ll make approximately 10,000 decisions a day (slight exaggeration, but it will feel that way). Develop a mental flowchart for:

  • Which decisions you should make yourself
  • Which ones to delegate
  • Which ones to make as a team

A simple heuristic: If someone on your team could make this decision with 70% of your quality but would grow from the experience, delegate it.

4. Communication Protocol Suite

Engineers often default to precision over clarity, which works great for computers but terribly for humans. Upgrade your communication stack with:

  • Translation layer: Converting technical concepts to business-speak
  • Empathy API: Reading emotional states and responding appropriately
  • Conflict resolution module: Addressing disagreements before they escalate

One VP of Engineering I know keeps a sticky note on his monitor that reads: “They don’t care how it works until they know why it matters.”

Engineer your way to the top. Code complexity is different than human complexity, but you can learn to handle both

Common Bugs in New Engineering Leaders

Let’s debug some of the most frequent issues I’ve seen:

Bug #1: The Technical Savior Complex

Symptoms: Jumping in to solve technical problems yourself, becoming the bottleneck for decisions, working late to “just fix things quickly.”

Fix: Schedule specific times for hands-on technical work. Outside those windows, your job is to enable others, not do their work.

Bug #2: The Conflict Avoidance Pattern

Symptoms: Letting performance issues slide, sugarcoating feedback, hoping problems will resolve themselves.

Fix: Reframe confrontation as an act of respect. You respect someone enough to be honest with them about where they stand and how they can improve.

Bug #3: The Micromanagement Infinite Loop

Symptoms: Checking in constantly, redoing others’ work, requiring approval for minor decisions.

Fix: Define clear guardrails instead of gates. Let people know the boundaries they shouldn’t cross, but give them freedom within those boundaries.

Bug #4: The Impostor Syndrome Exception

Symptoms: Feeling like you don’t deserve your role, compensating by either being overly authoritarian or completely hands-off.

Fix: Recognize that leadership is a skill like any other—learnable, improvable, and never perfect. You weren’t promoted because you’re already a perfect leader; you were promoted because someone saw leadership potential in you.

A Day in the Life: Engineering Leadership Edition

Let’s contrast what you might think leadership looks like versus reality:

Fantasy: Strategic thinking, inspiring speeches, making brilliant technical decisions

Reality:

  • 9:00 AM: Mediate disagreement between two engineers about coding standards
  • 10:30 AM: Explain to product why feature X will take longer than they hoped
  • 12:00 PM: Lunch meeting with another manager to discuss team boundaries
  • 1:30 PM: 1:1 with team member struggling with motivation
  • 2:30 PM: Shield team from random requests from other departments
  • 3:30 PM: Actually do some of your own work (if you’re lucky)
  • 4:30 PM: Prepare performance review documentation
  • 5:30 PM: Wonder where the day went and why your to-do list is longer than when you started

The Management Skill No One Talks About: Intentional Neglect

Here’s a truth that took me years to learn: As a leader, you will always have more things that need your attention than you have time to give. The real skill isn’t doing everything—it’s strategically choosing what not to do.

I call this “intentional neglect,” and it’s crucial for your sanity and effectiveness:

  • Some emails can wait 24 hours
  • Some processes can remain suboptimal
  • Some team members need less of your time than others
  • Some fires will burn themselves out without your intervention

The key is being deliberate about these choices, not making them by default.

Integration Testing: How to Know If You’re Succeeding

Unlike code, leadership success doesn’t announce itself with passing tests. Here are some signals to watch for:

  • Team members bring you problems earlier rather than later
  • Technical discussions include business context without your prompting
  • The team produces results even when you’re on vacation
  • People from other teams want to join your team
  • Your team members get promoted

And perhaps most importantly: You feel less needed for day-to-day operations over time.

Upgrading Your Mental Models

The mental models that served you well as an engineer need some refactoring:

  • From “I build things” to “I build people who build things”
  • From “fixing problems” to “enabling solutions”
  • From “technical depth” to “organizational breadth”
  • From “being right” to “finding the right approach together”

Conclusion: Engineering Leadership as a Systems Problem

Remember that your team is now the complex system you’re responsible for optimizing. Like any good system:

  • It needs the right inputs (clear goals, sufficient resources)
  • It needs well-designed processes (communication channels, feedback mechanisms)
  • It needs regular maintenance (team building, professional development)
  • It needs monitoring (but not constant interference)

The beautiful thing about engineering leadership is that your analytical mind is still your greatest asset—you’re just applying it to a far messier, more complex, and ultimately more rewarding problem: helping a group of talented humans do their best work together.

And on those days when you miss the simplicity of dealing with code instead of people, remember: code never thanks you, grows because of your mentorship, or does something brilliant you never could have thought of yourself. People do that. And that makes all the difference.

Next up in our Engineering Social Skills series: “Navigating Office Politics: A Field Guide for the Politically Averse Engineer”. Subscribe to get notified when it drops!