Leading with Empathy: Mastering Self-Care in the Whirlwind of Engineering Management

Have you ever felt overwhelmed balancing the demands of technology, people, and product as an Engineering Manager? You're not alone in this journey. Let's explore together how self-care is not just a necessity but a skill to master in our roles. 

An Engineering Manager is a strange beast. We live on the intersection of technology, people, and product, and must figure out a way to balance the needs of those three in a way that achieves a timely, positive outcome. 

That’s pretty damn stressful. One of the first lessons I learned transitioning into an EM role was that no matter how many tasks I took on, there was always more waiting. Let me repeat that: no matter how much work an EM does, there was always more work. 

This is very different from how I used to operate as an IC dev. In that role, I had a clear goal, a clear set of tasks to get there, and a day-to-day impression how close I was to completion. It’s much easier to leave work at work when you know you’re on track to a timely finish. It’s much harder to do so when the finish line is undefined or constantly moves.  

I’ve seen plenty of burned-out Engineering Managers in my career. Heck, I’ve been one myself, the major reason I’ve transitioned between IC and EM roles so often. Over time, I learned a set of tools to handle the issue. This article is about those tools. 

As you read through these self-care tools, I would challenge you to identify one you can implement in your role today. Share your choice in the comments and let’s discuss how we can collectively grow as empathic leaders. 

Tool 1: Effective Prioritization 

Imagine a Kanban board filled to the brim with tasks. Now, picture it streamlined with only the essentials. This isn’t just organizational magic; it’s a crucial self-care strategy, and applies not just at team level, but at a personal level, tool.  

The Kanban board is just an example: I’ve found a personal one to be very helpful, but plenty of other approaches cover this as well: the Eisenhower Matrix, a Stack, and so on. Pick one that works for you.  

This isn’t dissimilar from a Todo list with the major difference of having a clear at-a-glance way of knowing what to work on next.  

This much, I hope, is self-evident. The need for a prioritized Todo list was obvious enough to me. The less obvious issue was what to do with the stuff on the bottom of my stack. Since the list of most important things changed often, I would find myself starving the bottom items. That, once again, introduced stress. 

The issue can be tackled in two ways. Either you must be okay with dropping the less-important work, or you must learn to delegate it. More on delegation later, but dropping tasks deserves a special mention. 

 The most effective approach, of course, is to refuse to take them on in the first place. A highly effective way I’ve found to do this is to show the stakeholder my currently prioritized list and ask them where they think their task fits on that list. (Incidentally, the same approach works wonders at the team task list level.) If they can make a compelling case for why their task is more important than my others, great, I’ll put it to the top of my list. If not, we can agree that it’s unlikely that I’ll get to their task anytime soon, and they’re better off asking someone else. 

Often these tasks are ones I come up with myself. “I must calculate our current cycle time,” I’ll think. Or “I need to look through the active code reviews on my team.” Etc. It’s easy to get overloaded with all these self-created tasks that, while valuable, aren’t necessarily critical. I find that I must be ruthless with the value of anything I do if I’m to avoid being overloaded. 

To sum up, you’re going to drop things as an EM, and you must be okay with that. The important thing is to be able to drop the right things, and make sure the right things are being done.  

Tool 2: Delegation 

Now, let’s talk a little bit about delegation. I’ve already covered it quite extensively in an earlier article, but to sum it up, there are multiple types of delegation in increasing order of skill: 

1. Delegating for scale. That’s when you hand off tasks you simply can’t get to 
2. Delegating for visibility. That’s when you delegate highly-visible tasks to bolster your teammate’s visibility. (Which is a critical attribute in career growth.) 
3. Delegating for weakness. That’s when you delegate tasks you know you aren’t particularly good at to people you know are. 
4. Delegating for strength. That’s when you delegate tasks you are good at, taking the role of a coach to help someone get good at that task too.  

Being intentional with what you’re trying to delegate not only helps you feel less overwhelmed but also grows your team. 

Tool 3. Boundaries 

Ten years ago or so I used to work at Skype, out of Stockholm, Sweden. Because Skype had recently been bought by Microsoft, we used to have a lot of evening meetings. At first, I found myself working both day and evening, sometimes stretching into night. My family was understandably unhappy, and I was tired and irritable as well.  

So, I set boundaries. I told Redmond that I would not accept any meetings from 5pm to 9pm, and had two hours 9-11 I could make available instead, but that would mean I’d come to work a couple hours later the next day.  

Here’s another way of thinking about this same thing. I once asked the GPM of Skype for Business how she managed to balance her home and work lives without undue stress. The reason I’d posed that question to her was my observation that, for someone responsible for a major Microsoft product deployed in hundreds of enterprises, she seemed amazingly relax. 

“I provide value when I can,” she said. “When I’m at work, I do everything I can to provide as much value to our customers as possible. When I’m not at work, I can’t provide that value, and so I can focus on my home life.” 

In other words, compartmentalization. It takes effort to leave your work at work, especially for an EM, but it must be done if you hope to keep your sanity over a longer term.  

Tool 4: Trust 

This one is, perhaps, the hardest of the three. Eventually, you’re going to get overwhelmed. That may happen because your product is running late, because of a personnel issue, because of a conflict with upper management, because of your home life. When that happens, it’s critically important to have someone at work you can talk to. Hopefully, it’s your manager, but if you don’t have this kind of trust with your manager, find a peer you get along with. Maybe even a direct report. Vulnerability of this kind breeds trust, and trust, ultimately, is what creates loyalty on your team when the going gets tough. 

The other part of this tool is listening. In other words, when confronted with an issue, talk to your team about it, get their perspective. Listen. Listening to my team has gotten me out of more potential trouble than any other single skill I’ve practiced. Trust your directs with what’s going on, and then listen to their advice. This, too, engenders trust. 

Tool 5: Make yourself irrelevant

One of the key mindset shifts I’ve had as a new EM was to stop trying to make myself essential. This means empowering the team to be able to perform whatever tasks I perform without any loss in productivity. There’s nothing quite as stress-reducing as knowing your team can take over for you at a moment’s notice. The tools above, especially delegation and trust, help you get there, but it does require a very purposeful mindset shift. 

 From the get-go, your goal should be to make yourself redundant. This is unlikely to ever fully happen, of course, because ultimately, your team members have their jobs, and you have yours. But setting up the team culture to foster this sort of redundancy from the very beginning makes a dramatic difference in your stress levels later. 

 Conclusion 

Self-care for an EM means preparation. None of the tools I mentioned above work in-the-moment. They all need to be put in place in smooth waters, so when the waters get rough they’re there to help. 

 What about you? What tools do you use in your day-to-day to keep your stress level manageable? Join in the discussion!