How to be Managed

Learning how to be managed is useful for Software Engineers and Engineering Managers, because we all have managers. If you can make yourself more manageable, you will be able to move much faster through your career, but it will be more fun and rewarding. Make your managers life easy, and you both win.

And if you are an EM, this is extra important to learn so that you can coach your direct reports into being managed easier. How meta is that!?

So whether you’re a software engineer, an engineering manager, or someone else I tricked into reading this, pull up a chair, this is going to be good!

Managers Are People

Your manager is a person, and understanding that is important to being managed well.

They will not always be their best self. They may come to work stressed or be dealing with hard problems. They may have just heard bad news right before they meet with you. They may not always be as present as they would like to be for your meeting, or will mess up and say the wrong thing.

If you can give your manager grace, while still holding them accountable, it will go a long way to having a good relationship.

In a perfect world they would never be late, keep their personal problems at home, never be stressed, always know the right answer, etc etc. But you’re never going to find this manager, so work with the human one you have, and hopefully they give you the same grace in return.

Managers Have Different Styles

Not all managers operate the same way.

Some are hands-on, some are laid back, and others may be extremely process-oriented. Once you learn these things about your manager, you can anticipate their needs and help them help you.

You also have your own style, and understanding how you like to work will go a long way to finding a compromise that you and your manager can be comfortable with.

For example, I like to have a shared doc with my direct reports to make it easier to manage our conversations. Some like to use Google Docs, some like to use Slack, and some don’t want a shared space at all (won’t look at it, won’t write in it). For the ones who don’t want a shared space, I maintain one myself and take notes there just for me. This allows me to operate the way I want, but I’m still flexible for how each individual prefers to operate.

Not All Managers Are Good

You might get stuck with a bad manager and I’m sorry. Bad managers were one of the big motivators for why I joined the ranks, to make it less likely that you’d get a bad one. I figured if I was good, and I could help others be good managers, we’d save you the headache. We’ll keep working at it!

A bad manager is someone who doesn’t want to get good at being a manager, or maybe they are a bad fit for you. They could be someone obsessed with power, can’t stop micromanaging, or are too much about themselves to be good for others.

Don’t stay with a bad manager for too long, you deserve a good manager, but I respect that leaving is not always an option. Especially today where the market is hard, and switching teams or companies isn’t feasible for everyone.

In these situations, try your best to manage your manager. In whatever way they are bad, try to limit their options. Hold them accountable for doing right by you. I recommend the book Crucial Accountability here, but it’s difficult to give a nuanced answer for such a wide topic: There are so many ways a manager can be bad.

I won’t cover managing up in this post, but don’t give up hope, you have options! And you are welcome to reach out and if I can help I’ll do what I can.

You are Responsible for You

Understand what success looks like for you.

This is a job you need to do. Your manager cannot do it for you. They can help, but ultimately you need to figure it out. Does success for you mean:

• Get promoted by a certain date?

• Taking on a certain type of project? Certain size?

• Getting your total compensation to a certain level?

• Technical mastery?

• Impacts on users?

• Peer recognition?

• Giving talks?

You cannot be managed to success if you yourself don’t understand what that looks like. There are thousands of things you could consider as your personal success, and it doesn’t have to be just one thing.

For me to be successful, I want to be make enough money to provide for my family, be able to help my team thrive, and be able to help other managers be better. I have a detailed understanding of what each of these means, so that I can always be working towards them.

If you’re feeling upset with your manager for not making you more successful, first ask if you know what success looks like. From there you can communicate this to your manager, and they can help you work on it together.

Pursue Your Desire Relentlessly

Once you know what success looks like, go get it!

Bring an agenda to every 1:1 with your manager. Fill it up during the week, and go through all your items. You want to do interviews? Awesome, add it to your agenda doc, and in your next meeting ask your manager how you get trained to do interviews.

Advocate for yourself and learn to be heard.

Don’t let a no from your manager stop you. If I did, I never would have become a remote engineer.

My manager told me no, and so I researched. I learned. I really wanted to be remote full time. After a few months, I asked if I could go remote for a week while I visited family.

I worked my butt off, and the remote stint went well, my manager was happy. A few months later I did two weeks. And then we did three. Eventually I moved back to Canada, and I asked to go remote. We had so much evidence that it worked, they were willing to give it a try.

I advocated for what I want, and I worked tirelessly to get it. If I just asked my manager to be able to go remote, got a no, and kept asking, no progress would be made. Instead I made it happened, and kept my manager in the loop so they could help me when it made sense. This made it very easy to manage me, and I got what I wanted.

If your manager is not helpful, look for other places. This is super true if you have a bad manager. Want to interview and your manager is useless? Talk to one of the recruiters yourself, talk to other interviewers who do training. I am not advocating for defying your manager, but if they are lazy or unwilling to put in the effort, don’t let that stop you.

Don’t Wait For Feedback

This is another area that could be a book.

Everyone says they do not get enough feedback. As a manager, no matter how much we give it’s never enough. Good software engineers relentlessly want to improve, and they love having all that glorious feedback data.

As a person being managed, make it easier to get feedback by telling your manager what feedback you are looking for.

When I was giving a talk at the company, I asked my manager to give me feedback on my presentation and how confident I appeared. My manager was able to give very specific feedback on how my umms and uuhhhs and body language helped or didn’t help me appear confident. I was able to work on these things and when I gave the real presentation, it went so much smoother.

If I had not asked at all, or just said “give me feedback”, it’s very unlikely I would have gotten much. Maybe my manager would have said the same things, but the chance is slim.

This obviously works for people who are not your manager, but your manager is always looking for ways to give you feedback, and this is not true of everyone else you encounter. So if you give them notes on where you’d like feedback, you’re going to see a huge improvement, and your manager will be happy at how much easier it is to manage you than your peers.

Learn To Accept Feedback Well

I have received a document that went on for pages about how I was not doing my job properly, and it outlined all the places I was failing as a manager.

This document was sent to my manager, and my skip level manager. I didn’t agree with the wild claims in the document, but do you know what I responded with?

I thanked the person who put it together.

I have no doubt this document was meant to discredit me and get me fired, but still it was feedback. Even if the content was ludicrous, somebody still thought these things. Knowing they think it, even if I disagree, was incredibly useful.

Getting criticism can be hard, especially if it’s from your manager. If you’re struggling with a piece of feedback, even if you disagree with it, thank the person for giving it. Knowing that your manager thinks some untrue thing about you is a gift.

Accepting feedback and being grateful does not mean you agree with the feedback. At the end of the day, gaining someone elses feedback is a tool you can use or not use.

In my case, I was able to understand that the person was very unhappy with how I was operating as an engineering manager. This enabled me to sit down with them in a 1:1 and explain my role to them. They were not an engineer, and so the way I managed was different. They wanted me to micromanage my team, and tell the engineers what to do. This is not how the team operates, and while this is upsetting for them, that wasn’t the issue.

The underlying issue was that they wanted something done and it wasn’t getting done, and they went after my management style as the culprit. After we level set on the role of an EM, and how engineering teams operate, we were able to discuss their actual concerns, and find a solution together.

Had I rejected the feedback or gone to arms, we would have become combatants. As someone who leads with empathy and kindness, I certainly had some words for their management style, but that would have cost us both.

And something tells me they probably wouldn’t have thanked me for my context :)

Closing Thoughts

I’ll be honest, I am choosing to end this article before I feel like I’ve covered everything, because I wanted to spend this evening working on the course, but I got this idea of “how to be managed” stuck in my head, and I have not stopped writing about it. SO, we are going to put a pin in it. Here are a quick few thoughts to tie us off for now, and I will probably revisit this topic sometime in the future:

• You will not get everything you ask for, but ask anyway.

  • Even a no has value, and now your manager knows what you want. I got a no for remote, but asking helped make it eventually happen.

• If you are unhappy, say something. Don’t be silent. Don’t let it fester. Even if you don’t think there is a solution (you’ll be surprised).

• If you want to get promoted, ask how that happens.

• If you get stuck and you genuinely tried to solve the problem, ask for help.

  • This is a goldilocks problem, don’t ask too early, don’t ask too late. If you’re unsure, let your manager know you’re unsure and work together on what timing is appropriate.

• If you want more money, ask for more money. Be open to hearing a no, but more likely you will learn how to get more money.

• Work life balance is important, don’t wait for your manager to make it happen.

  • More hours does not mean more output. It can in small doses for short periods, but burnout is real, more hours is never the way to get more done as a software engineer or manager.

• Asking for advice is gold. Don’t always bring problems, bring solutions, but problems can be fun too. Your manager likely likes solving problems.

• Remember that your managers job is to be a force multiplier for you, not to do the work. You do the work, they help you do the work better.

• Sometimes your managers best move is to do nothing. To not give you the answer. To not solve the problem. To not give you the resource. This can be frustrating, but it is sometimes what leads to the most growth and innovation.

I hope this helps!