| As an engineer who has been in senior management positions, I can sympathize with your position. This is a good time for introspection. Almost all companies go through growth pains from a very small, close team to larger teams. The politics of small teams is different from the politics of larger team. Some of your questions seems like you are not comfortable with how larger organizations work. When I was a CTO, I made a mistake of telling engineers to come to me with problems and suddenly I was trying to solve every single tiny issue. Make sure the problems come up to you are worth their time. Otherwise, the managers below you are not doing their job. You need to trust your peers and earn their trust. Further, everyone works under different expectations and pressure. Everything is a trade-off and everybody makes mistakes is correct, but that itself can be very unhealthy attitude for the company. It breeds complacence and creates half-baked systems. Hold yourself, your teams and others to a very high standard, all the time. I would also suggest that you learn how to influence others using soft power. Understand what they want, where they are coming from and what their goals are. Understand and respect org boundaries and do think about secondary effects. Finally, you are management and you cannot disagree with yourself. For specific points, if you and your peer disagrees, you do not want to do it in an all-hands. Similarly, you do not want your managers to fight in front of their teams - it creates us vs them issues naturally. Everything else there also has another side to that coin and I suggest you think about those very carefully. |