From the course: Tech Career Skills: Moving from Developer to Engineering Manager

What do managers do?

From the course: Tech Career Skills: Moving from Developer to Engineering Manager

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What do managers do?

- Let's look at the responsibilities of an engineering manager by discussing the task and the duties that you might expect to carry out as part of your responsibilities as a manager. As a manager, you might find yourself tasked with taking often abstract goals and vision from your executive teams and then breaking these down into actually actionable goals, which you can then work towards with your team. You're also going to be taking feedback and information from your team back up to your own manager and back up to those executive teams as you advocate for your team. Every workplace is going to be a little bit different. Don't worry if the tasks you face as a manager don't completely match the tasks we're looking at together. As part of your responsibility for your team's work, you're going to need to check in with them regularly. Speaking to your team as a whole and with members of your team one on one will be part of most managers' experience. We'll look more closely at holding effective one to one meetings with your reports later on in this course. These meetings can also be leveraged to help work with your reports to manage their work life balance. As part of advocating for your team, you're going to need to work with other people both in and outside your company to make sure your team members have the tools, the support and the information they need to do great work. This work with and reporting to additional stakeholders can take up a lot of managers' time. Your work is not only going to involve regular one to one meetings with your team members but you'll also be meeting regularly with your own managers and perhaps meeting with project leads, maybe clients and loads of other stakeholders. The volume of meeting time can vary between workplaces but I find it's usually more than new managers expect. Your tasks linked to helping your team members progress professionally are goal setting and holding regular one to one meetings with them. For each member of your team to grow professionally they're going to need those clear, actionable goals to shoot for. Coaching them around these goals is going to be part of your day to day job. To let them know how they're doing relative to these goals, you're going to want to give them clear and effective feedback as often as you can. Part of this feedback cycle will include rewards or maybe you can reward their hard work with a promotion or maybe a raise. Given enough time working as a manager, a review-related task that most managers will eventually have to face is giving references for one of your team members when they're ready to move on to a new role, either within your company or somewhere else out in the industry. As a good manager, you already know that you may eventually have to part ways with most employees. But you can leave them both with the fond memories of working with your team and also the effects of your guidance.

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