This year I took a leap. A leap that always terrified me. The journey that every manager who has ever managed me directly or indirectly has taken. It was time for me to be in their shoes. Throughout my career I have had many managers in 4 different companies. Some inspired me, some terrified me, and some just played it safe. There were leaders outside of my direct managers I admired and it was time! I had a path cut out for me. Time to taste from the same goblet. Will it be poison or elixir? Only time will tell but there are some tell tell signs.

The Fear

I have been an engineer since I finshed my undergrad in 2008. Well, its over 11 years ago. But I was an engineer before then (I just didn’t have a degree). I spent a lot of time at my local CSC computer center to print the pyramid of stars. Anyone who was learning to code in the early 2000s know exactly what I am talking about. Flow charts were my cup of tea. I loved expressing complex solutions using simple logical constructs.

Since then, I have worked for multiple tech companies contributing code, ideas and constructive arguments with many smart engineers. There were definitly times where I felt like sh* when I made production impacting blunders. Bugs that have caused the entire company to come to a halt and NO, I did not get fired for that, at-least not until a later point in my career.

Throughout my journey in the tech industry there was one thing that has always been a constant. My fear of being a manager. I feared it, not because it was difficult but because, it required programming human interactions and humans don’t follow 0s and 1s. There are many ways people react and they don’t always follow your script. You can’t spend the night coming up with a great solution and type feverishly into someone’s brain. This uncertainty meant all that I have learnt in my last 10 years were no longer applicable in my job and it almost felt like starting from scratch.

The Struggle

I have always wanted to grow as an engineer. I love speaking the language of technology. This has helped me take on more and more complex problems and solve them. As the scope of the engineering problems I was handling increased in size and complexity it was clear that I wasn’t going to scale. Of course, I had all the time to work on such projects but for real success, even if I put in 24x7 of my time into it there was still so much that needed to be done with tough deadline. I had to scale, for the success of my projects & the company. I started gravitating towards more planning side of the projects. I figured that if I made a plan of execution to the most detailed level and tell my fellow co-workers who were freed up by their bosses to work with me on the project, they would just follow instructions and be a multiplier of me. It would be as if there were more than one of me. Except, I was wrong. Humans don’t scale like machines. Yeah, its an obvious predicament. My fellow team mates had minds of their own, they listened to their own experience and they acted according to their principles and vision. Now, that was a problem! Now suddenly there weren’t (me * N) engineers. There were me, X1, X2, X3, X4 etc.. where Xi was their own unique engineer with their own unique ways. No matter how detailed I layed out a plan of action for the project based on how I would do it with daily planned out task, things would slip, change, get rejected or never completed.

The Growth

There were few things I learnt through my struggle to become a better engineer working on large and complex problems with multiple engineers (who were not me!). They became my principles for effective leadership

  1. Always convey The Why
  2. Seek to understand first
  3. Provide actionable feedback at the right moment
  4. Decide early with best data available
  5. Set expectations and hold accountable
  6. Balance between acting and being
  7. Make other’s time worthwhile
  8. In the end, what matters are results

I started leading large and complex projects with these principles. Sure, there were failures, and there were moments that pulled me emotionally to the bottom. Every struggle I had, helped me become a better engineer and an effective tech lead.

The Choice

I realized that being a leader is a choice. Its a conscious choice one has to take. Sure, you may already have the skills to be a leader, someone people can look up to and follow into a better future for them but you have to make the choice.

Two roads diverged in the woods, one of them would make me a better engineer something I have always wanted in life and the other was an uncertain path filled with wild things in every corner. I took the road that scared the heck out of me. Why did I do it? I could have continued down my comfortable path of tech leading, and delivering large and complex solutions to real life problems. To be blunt, I don’t know! Something in me told me that was the right path and I knew I had the best support team cheering for me and supporting me. I did not take that decision lightly. I still don’t. Every day I think about that choice and think, what can I do today that will make me the most amazing leader that people would want to trust their careers with. It is not something I take for granted. I want people to believe in me, I don’t want to let them down. The fear definitely keeps me in check! It pushes me to think into the future, work with people to understand and learn.

The Future

Looking forward, I want to be so much more and I want to do so much more. Being a leader means building trust and building a great team who trust each other to accomplish things bigger than them. I don’t take that responsibility likely. Whenever I feel like I have to make a tough choice I think of why I chose to be a manager,

To enable people reach their highest potential to achieve organization’s mission to change the world positively

I ask myself, do the choice in front of me enable my people to reach their highest potential. This has definitely been my guiding light. I don’t pretend that I know everything about the future. Its the most uncertain part of life but I am definitely excited. The people I manage my change, move on or continue to grow as leaders themselves but I will continue my journey regardless and see where it takes me.