The Unspoken Challenges of Engineering Leadership

<p>You’ve just become an engineering leader — a tech lead, team lead, or engineering manager. Congratulations! You probably seek guidance on what skills you should develop in this position.</p> <p>You will read about decision-making, team building, priorities management, and delegation. These are classic examples of skills each leader needs to invest in.</p> <p>Let’s look at that from a different angle. In this article, you will find the list of the most common challenges discussed during my mentoring sessions. These struggles are often less obvious yet raised by most engineering leaders I’ve ever worked with.</p> <h1>Hidden struggles of engineering leaders</h1> <h2>Self-doubt</h2> <p>Fresh leaders struggle to understand how much added value they generate for the company. It’s easier to capture the outcome of the code they produced or the features they delivered. In that light, team empowerment, 1:1s, expectations management, and decision-making are seen as distractors.</p> <p>A good example here can be a performance review process. Writing feedback and discussing it with all teammates usually takes a few weeks. This period is often perceived as “admin work,” where a leader delivers zero value while focusing only on “HR formalities.”</p> <p><a href="https://blog.practicalengineering.management/engineering-leaders-hidden-challenges-dc007155ff3d"><strong>Website</strong></a></p>