Management for engineers: Month 1

I’ve recently transitioned from an engineer to a manager of a high performing engineering team. Here’s a list of things that ended up being useful on my first month.

Questions for my first one-to-one’s

I’ve copied a list of questions that can be used on a first one-to-one with your teammate from a “Resilient management” book by Lara Hogan. They were incredibly useful for 2 reasons:

1. I didn’t need to prepare much for the meetings, so I felt more confident.
2. The questions are actually well thought out, so I came out of them with a lot of useful information.

Taking notes during my one-to-one’s

Obvious one. I forgot a lot of things that were said during those meetings and having my notes was really helpful.

Coaching questions

Coaching questions from “The Coaching Habit” book by Michael Bungay Stanier also proved to super useful as I was helping my teammates find answers to the questions they had. These questions also helped me avoid my default mode of being direct and providing answers.