| Leadership is a hard to balance activity. One common failure mode is to keep doing the old job. Do hard parts, don't trust other people with the most critical parts, ... The opposite is just as common: Forgetting the technical parts. In my experience, it takes about 6 months to go from sharpest knife in the drawer to architecture buzzword bingo specialist. An engineering manager needs non stop contact with reality to stay real. The good managers I knew kept doing a small part of engineering, but not anything critical. Say, a few hours a week. A good manager can be away for 2 weeks without anything technical failing and needing their immediate attention. Another side is managing your people: Set quality standards, build processes, give vision and direction. Overly technical managers tend to forget this part of the job. What tends to go reasonably well is managing upwards. If you do the legwork to know the numbers (money, man hours,..) and have some vision, you can help negotiating what can and can not be done. Don't get me wrong, this is hard work and eats calendar time. But at least the skills are there. |