Defining the Manager Role
When I started my journey as a manager, many moons ago, my director at the time gave me some of the soundest advice for the role I’ve ever received.
You see, the first team I managed was actually a team that I worked in as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). In fact I’m still in contact with everyone from that team nearly ten years later and we regularly meet up to hang out.
But that’s a topic for another article.
While I moved up the ranks from being an engineer to being an engineering manager, I didn’t mentally shift gears as I should have. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like I could assign tasks to my co-workers and friends, I assigned tasks without any problems. It was that sometimes I’d look at a task, be it a deploy to production or a troubleshooting scenario, and I’d do it myself.
Not for any particular reason, other than I knew how to do the task at hand and figured I’d just be as fast doing it myself as opposed to assigning it out.
My director caught wind of this and pulled me aside for a coffee. The words he said to me have stuck with me as a sort of management mantra ever since.
“Nobody is questioning whether or not you can do technical tasks,” he said. “However, you shouldn’t be doing them. You should trust the people who report to you are just as capable at being engineers, if not more so, than you. You just need to be smart enough to know which person to ask to do a job. Technically, you’re meant to be the dumbest person on the team.”
The Mind Shift
His words struck an interesting bell in my brain. On the one hand he was telling me that I could back off from doing the work I’d been doing for six years up to that point. On the other hand he was explaining to me a key element people miss when it comes to being a manager.
Management is all about trust. You trust that your team will do the tasks you assign them and that if they need help they trust you will come to their aide.
One of the manager’s primary responsibilities is building that trust up, both within the team and with the team itself. That is a hard thing to do if you, as the manager, are doing the jobs of the folk on your team.
As my director explained to me, the manager, by offloading the ‘fun technical work’ to people on their team is then free to focus on other areas. Process improvement, people management and training, upping their own people skills so that they can run a high impact team.
Now, why am I writing the above? Well in recent years I’ve seen an interesting trend in the I.T. industry when it comes to manager roles and since the recent economic downturn the trend is getting worse.
Companies are looking for blue unicorn managers.
The Blue Unicorn Manager
What is a unicorn manager and why are they blue? Well blue because I just like the colour, but the rest I will explain now.
Companies these days are fighting a number of things that cause their profits to not be as high as they’d like. The cost of doing business is ever increasing and board members or business owners still want to be making the big bucks. But how do you keep a business running, ensure that you have the right headcount to get things done, and still save money?
You mash two roles together and hope nobody notices.
Giving birth to the Unicorn Manager.
The roles I’ve seen recently will list all the usual responsibilities you’d expect from a manager. Mentoring, hiring, training, working with external teams, etc. But then they will have a line about ‘technical expectations’. Some of these make sense, referencing various technologies a manager should be familiar with or have some exposure to from their engineering days. Standard, boilerplate, stuff so that you can be sure the person you hire at least understands the infrastructure they will be looking after.
Then you get to the actual conversation with their hiring team and learn that not only do you need to know about these technologies, you will also be working on them.
That the role is, unlike the advertised job description, a manager who will be expected to be very hands-on.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that managers have to be completely hands-off, but there is a big difference between having a manager who can dig out the team when required and trying to have the manager be another engineer on the team.
One with the added bells and whistles of being able to actual build up the team.
What better way to save on headcount costs than to bring in an engineering manager you want to be part engineer part manager.
One who would find it very hard to build trust.
Why A Blue Unicorn Manager Is Bad
As I’ve mentioned above, managers need to build trust with and within their team. If a manager is expected by the company to do the engineering work, then that puts them in a very hard position when it comes to trust building. After all, wouldn’t an engineer wonder why the manger is doing tasks they could do, rather than assign them?
The reality, however, is if a manager is expected to do the work of those on their team it leaves very little time for the manager to focus on what they should be doing.
Building up their team. Mentoring engineers so that they feel their career in the company is a growth opportunity. Making other teams in the company see how a high impact team should look. Fixing, or implementing, processes that ensure maximum output with minimum stress.
Those and a few more are tasks that take up large portions of a manager’s day. If they are also expected to do engineering tasks, they will have to juggle. Something, somewhere, will suffer.
And you can be sure that the people skills side of things is what will be put on the backburner.
There simply is no way for an engineering manager to do the dual roles at the same time effectively. More often than not managers who double job report higher levels of attrition, as the people on their team feel that they aren’t growing.
Should A Manager Be Technical?
While I have highlighted a lot of the areas a manager should spend their day, it does raise the question about whether or not a manager should be technical at all. Why not just have managers from any industry apply for roles in any other industry?
Well the long and the short of that is that yes, a manager should be technical.
You see a technical manager running a team of highlight talented engineers should be able to speak the language they speak. The manager should be able to understand and question design choices, maybe suggest alternatives as a solution to a problem, even perform the odd code review from time to time. These are skills every engineering manager should have, but being a technical manager and doing technical things are wildly different.
It is a cost saving excercise that many companies just haven’t seemed to grasp yet. If you go looking for the blue unicorn manager, you won’t be long opening up more roles.
Leave engineering managers to focus on the areas they should and hire engineers, you will save on recruiting costs in the long run.
