The Best Managers Acquire Power To Give It Away

• Even though the manager is an authority figure, the best engineering managers acquire power to give it away.
• What this means is they will establish ownership over a space and then give control of it to an engineer on their team to help them grow. This is especially important growing engineers to senior levels and beyond.
• By making the engineers on the team share authority, the team becomes more resilient, so that it doesn't collapse when the manager is out.
• Alex's Instagram example:
  • The oncall in his org was very weak and unhealthy.
  • His manager got the ball rolling and collected a working group of senior+ engineers and managers to align on the problem and agree to solving it.
  • After his manager established a sphere of influence here, they handed it over to Alex to lead the entire effort and successfully revamp the oncall system for ~25 mobile engineers.
  • Manager easily could have led this effort themselves but chose to delegate to Alex, so that he could build authority in this area.

Related resources:

• "Why would a senior make themselves replaceable?"
• Why Great Engineering Managers Are Like Captain America
• What Makes A Truly Great Tech Lead - A VP of Engineering's Perspective