How to get started
Part II - making room for your employees transition from engineering to management
I wrote the first part of how to get started focusing on the individual. This is not exactly the focus of my book but has been coming up on individual sessions that warrants a short series.
If you manage a team or represent a company, there are a few things you can setup to help these individuals to move careers and invest on future leaders.
I've discussed about a career ladder but it is important to check how you move people around ladders. I personally don't believe in the Y career, I think and saw that it is possible to have a pendulum career and create a path that does not means you have to make a commitment you can't change.
Along with your career a ladder, it is important to create devices that can be as simple as defining time spent coding vs time spent coordinating to identify an entry point. It is also important to differentiate leadership from management. You can start with the scope, as I did in my career ladder example.
You can identify some profiles too: the senior engineer that steps in to help create clarity for the team, the tech lead that is moving around more than one team, the engineer that is willing to take over local responsibilities but don't know where to start. These all sits on different points of the tech leadership spectrum.
Leaders will emerge among individual contributors - which is a silly name as no one is Borg yet so either coding or managing you are doing it individually and in a team.
If you don't do this, people will put the effort and leave when they are ready to tackle the challenge instead of being around trained and helping your company not to have to mass hire leaders when your team grows.
A good part of this is to train current managers on skills, mentoring, support and whenever it is the case to identify any insecurity or visibility issues that may them see the newcomers as a challenge or threat to their career. I have to mention that as is because we are all humans and that's a human problem. We are not always at our best and no culture is perfect.
Having periodic career evaluation - and knowing they are not the same as performance evaluation - helps a lot to support these situations. Creating a forum to broadcast opportunities to start or to specialize is another tool you can implement for free and is incredibly helpful.
That will create the next wave of leadership in the same manner that you manage the growth of junior to mid leve to senior engineers. It is important to think about retention as savings for the future. It is a network of people that are able to step in after trained.
Throughout all this it is important to create a healthy relationship with your People/HR department to have proper support. That's it.
Did you know I've published a book that is the user guide for your tech leadership job ? It is called The CTO Field Guide and it has a lot of actionable information and framework to help you navigate through a new promotion or as a seasoned leader. You can find more about it at https://ctofieldguide.com.