By understanding your engineer’s driving motivations for wanting that new role and making sure that they’re realistic about the right things to optimize for with those motivations in mind. By Vishwa Krishnakumar.
Engineering leadership within companies are constantly looking to create an equitable process to figure out who on a software engineering team gets the opportunity to try management. However, there aren’t many good resources to help them figure out how they can spark interest in candidates that might be a good fit for management.
The main rules of thumb to follow while starting to move someone towards a management path are:
- They have to be strong, solid, and dependable engineers
- They need something to anchor on when they’re learning a new set of skills
- The need to find opportunities for them to become somewhat responsible for delivering other people’s work
- They have to actually be excited to play the role of management and also understand that engineering management is a whole different ballgame altogether
Engineers are either actively pursuing a management path or you see the talent in them to be good in such a role. In both cases, you can start by offering smaller management tasks, without the need to add a label to them. The most important thing you can do here is to create a good career ladder that outlines meaningful criteria for those roles. Good read!
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