This post is part of my weekly engineering manager competency review series. At the end of each week, I publish a review of the notes I thought over the past week. My goal is to create a log where I can capture these insights for future me to review.
The competencies below are from Square's Software Engineering Career Ladder.
Coaching & Development
The goal is to coach, provide timely, actionable feedback, and invest time in career development of team members; e.g., via 1:1s and aligning employee growth with opportunity.
What's good
- Improved delivering verbal feedback
Last quarter, one of the items in my OKRs is improving my feedback skills. I was able to practice this a lot by writing feedback for my peers, reflecting on how I delivered it, and asking mentors what can be improved. Overall, I think I've made really good progress with improving my feedback skills.
But since starting my role as an engineering manager, I realized that giving feedback to my reports during 1:1s is so much different than giving feedback to my peers. The big difference for me when delivering verbal feedback is that I tend to forget to follow best practices. So after giving much thought about it, I decided to try to write my feedback ahead of time, imagining I would send that through a Slack PM. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on the tone and structure of my feedback. So far, after trying this, I feel it has helped me a lot with giving helpful feedback to my reports.
Do Better
- Giving time to digest the feedback
One thing I think I can do differently is sharing a written version of the verbal feedback I've given, by writing it down in my direct report's 1:1 document. This would give them the opportunity to digest it more later if they need to.
Action Item
- After giving verbal feedback, share a written version of it