The Engineering Leader

Self-Management

Probably, you have a manager—at least according to the org chart. They may provide hands-on help, guidance, and feedback. Even if that is the case today, over time the scope of your work role will (I hope!) increase, and at some point, your manager won’t utilize a hands-on management style; whoever your manager is will no longer have the time or inclination to give that to you. At that point, but ideally before, you will need to figure out how to self-manage: how to prioritize your workload, how to improve your own effectiveness, how to get feedback when it’s implicit rather than explicit.

Everyone has had a manager they thought was ineffective, and many of us have seen someone (or have been that someone) burn out or “nope” out because they didn’t want to do it anymore. It’s easy to say “that manager was bad” and much harder to explain why they burned out, to identify what the manager was not doing or shouldn’t have been doing. Burnout (“a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress” per Psychology Today) can be something of a catchall explanation.

Management is more about the impact than the tactics, and as a result, many people go into management lacking a clear mental model of what managers do. Type A overachievers are inclined to address this by deciding to do everything themselves. This strategy can go on for only so long, and inherently, it cannot scale. So what happens when they are forced to admit ...