Yet Another Leadership Article

Because decades later, too many managers are still left to figure it out on their own.

10 min read

A note before I begin: For those already invested in this topic, little here may feel new. Some ideas deserve revisiting because we still struggle to put them into practice.

Last Thursday evening, I joined a local senior leadership dinner and roundtable designed to remove the usual signals of status. Our name tags showed only our names, and the hosts asked us to leave our organizations, roles, and egos at the door. The evening centered on building community and contributing from experience on equal footing.

The conversation

Each table explored a different question about building community. Ours moved from mentoring to management. People shared feedback from direct reports, moments that made them proud, and why they believed they had become good managers.

Two people described themselves as good managers or strong leaders. I have always hesitated to make that claim about myself. Leadership is something other people experience, and they ultimately determine how well you led. The strongest evidence comes from the growth, trust, results, and lasting impressions of the people who reported to you, worked alongside you, and led you.

Another person at the table shared a very different experience. Across four companies, she had received little direction, few meaningful one-on-ones, and almost no useful feedback. Different organizations, same leadership gap.

Poor management leaves an imprint too. Most of us can name a bad manager and still carry a few scars from the experience. We remember how they made us feel, and that memory often shapes the leader we never want to become.

She may have been the only person at the table who knew much about me beyond that room. She knew some of my management history, my relationships with direct reports and peers, and that I write about leadership. When she finished her story, she looked directly at me and said, “You should write about this.”

I wondered what else could be said. Thousands of articles, books, lectures, and programs already explore good management, and I have written about leadership and developing people myself.

Still, this article is my response to her request.

That is what has not changed. In many cases, organizations still promote capable people into management and expect them to learn how to lead while doing the job. Many receive little formal preparation, limited coaching, and no clear explanation of the management principles their leaders value.

Personal styles will vary, but expectations around one-on-ones, feedback, psychological safety, delegation, performance, and developing others should be clear.

Managers of managers carry responsibility for teaching and reinforcing those expectations. When they do not, new managers learn through observation and trial and error, and the people they lead absorb the cost.

One executive commented that many large organizations are reducing professional development spending, affecting leadership programs and employee development. The concern felt familiar. Development is easy to praise and equally easy to defer when budgets tighten.

Others shared more encouraging stories. Two large companies had created leadership apprenticeships and strong development programs. They treat leadership as a capability people can learn, practice, observe, and strengthen. A person’s experience often depends on how seriously the organization treats development.

My own baptism by fire

Earlier in my career, I was promoted because I was considered a strong software engineer. My people skills probably helped me earn the opportunity. I didn’t have a clear model for leading another person’s growth, performance, and daily experience, so I learned through trial, error, and observation.

That education carried a human cost. I made significant mistakes as a manager. A software mistake may break a process, system, or technology that we can diagnose and repair. A management mistake lands on a person.

There were moments when my behavior, direction, or judgment fell short, and someone else carried the consequence. I am sorry for those moments and their effect on the people involved. Their experience remains real, and what I learned gives me a lasting obligation to remember and lead differently.

Managers work with other people’s confidence, opportunities, growth, and working lives. Our mistakes can become part of someone else’s story. Some of mine significantly changed how I understood and practiced leadership.

I was fortunate to have strong mentors and managers who gave me access to leadership programs. Most of my development still required personal investment. I enrolled in programs, hired coaches, built relationships with managers from other companies, participated in communities of practice, and read far too many leadership books to count.

Leadership resembles parenting, coaching, and other deeply human capabilities. Books give us language, courses introduce models, and conversations challenge our assumptions. Experience develops the judgment we need when another person needs us to listen, decide, respond, or admit we were wrong.

Experience has shaped my leadership more than any single program. Reflection, honest feedback, coaching, curiosity, and changed behavior turn that experience into growth. Mentors, peers, apprenticeships, and real responsibility give managers a much better chance to improve.

Organizations have a responsibility

Personal ambition needs organizational support. Many new managers lack experienced peers, a starting framework, or the resources to fund coaching themselves.

New managers continue entering the role as experienced leaders encounter new conditions. Economic pressure tests what organizations genuinely value, and cultures change as people move through positions of authority. Every generation of leaders has to put these principles into practice again.

What the research keeps telling us

The evidence has been remarkably consistent. Google’s Project Oxygen analyzed more than 10,000 data points. Effective managers coached people, empowered teams, created inclusive environments, communicated well, supported career development, established direction, collaborated, made sound decisions, focused on results, and maintained enough technical knowledge to advise the team.

Project Aristotle identified five conditions behind team effectiveness: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Managers shape each one through how they respond to mistakes, invite disagreement, clarify decisions, and connect work to purpose.

A separate Microsoft study found that maintaining a positive environment, growing talent, and enabling autonomy received the highest ratings. Technical ability ranked fourteenth among the fifteen attributes studied. Technical judgment creates credibility. The greater differentiator is what a manager enables others to accomplish.

Mentoring contributes to that work. A mentor offers perspective, asks questions, and helps another person see possibilities. Management adds responsibility for expectations, feedback, performance, opportunities, accountability, and the conditions in which a team operates. Great managers bring mentoring qualities into a role with formal responsibility.

Five conditions great managers create

Daniel Pink’s Drive offers a useful center for turning the research into practice. Pink describes autonomy, mastery, and purpose as three ingredients of lasting motivation. Psychological safety gives people room to exercise them, while enablement addresses the system around the team. Together, they form five conditions.

1. Safety: I can speak, question, experiment, and learn

People need room to raise risks, ask for help, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, and offer unfinished ideas. High standards fit comfortably within a psychologically safe team.

Managers shape that environment through how they respond to bad news. Curiosity, accountability, and acknowledgment of their own fallibility invite candor. Blame drives questions and risks underground, where they become more expensive.

2. Autonomy: I have meaningful ownership

Autonomy requires context, clear goals, decision boundaries, and accountability. Teams understand the desired outcome and constraints, then use their judgment to determine how to proceed.

This matters deeply in software engineering, where work depends on creativity and judgment. Micromanagement may produce compliance for a while, but it gradually weakens the capability the team needs to develop.

3. Mastery: I am growing

Great managers develop people through timely feedback, an understanding of individual strengths and aspirations, stretch opportunities, experimentation, and connections with mentors.

Developing future leaders also requires delegation, sponsorship, exposure to harder decisions, and opportunities to lead before receiving the title. The defining quality is a manager who turns an investment in someone’s growth into feedback, opportunity, and trust.

4. Purpose: I understand why the work matters

Purpose becomes real when engineers can connect daily decisions to customer needs and business outcomes. That context helps them understand priorities, make tradeoffs, and help decide which problems deserve investment.

People also need clarity about roles, expectations, priorities, and how decisions will be made. Feedback after delivery helps the team learn whether its work created value.

5. Enablement: The organization helps the team succeed

Conflicting priorities, unresolved dependencies, fragile platforms, excessive approvals, and constant interruptions can consume more energy than the work itself. Great managers improve the system around the team by protecting focus, resolving constraints, securing resources, and building sustainable ways of working.

DORA’s research on transformational leadership reinforces this idea. Leaders influence delivery performance by helping teams adopt the technical and product capabilities that improve outcomes. Their leverage comes through the environment they create.

Technical credibility still matters. Engineering managers need enough domain understanding to recognize risk, evaluate tradeoffs, and ask useful questions. It becomes a constraint when the manager must solve every problem or approve every decision. Success comes from building a team that can move, learn, and make sound decisions independently.

Leadership is experienced in every direction

Our leadership’s judgment largely belongs to the people who experience it.

Direct reports see how we use authority. Their growth, trust, safety, and independence reveal how we led downward. Peers and cross-functional partners experience our candor, dependability, and commitment to shared outcomes. Senior leaders see our judgment, accountability, willingness to surface risk, and ability to disagree constructively.

The strongest evidence comes from patterns across former team members, peers, partners, and leaders. The continued success of people and teams after we leave may be the clearest signal of all.

The most credible claim I can make is simple: I have worked hard to become a better leader, and the people and results around me continue to teach me.

Managing managers multiplies the responsibility

When we manage managers, our influence reaches every person they lead. How we coach them, respond to their mistakes, delegate authority, and discuss performance shapes how they manage others.

We help managers strengthen their judgment, confidence, values, and self-awareness so they can create strong teams in their own way. Their influence compounds as the people they develop become managers and mentors themselves.

Executive scope adds strategy, financial responsibility, and external commitments. Leaders operate through other leaders, systems, and decision structures. They still need to invest in managers, create space for candor, develop successors, and understand how people experience the organization. Strategy and execution happen through people.

Values travel through what senior leaders model, reward, question, tolerate, and correct. Responsibility for people expands with the title because executive behavior influences every leader and team below it.

Build managers deliberately

Leadership apprenticeships and structured development programs can bridge the gap into management. Future managers can observe experienced leaders, practice feedback, lead within defined boundaries, and receive guidance before assuming formal authority. Peer communities also reduce the isolation that causes many managers to struggle alone.

Without this investment, employees and teams absorb the cost through avoidable mistakes, inconsistent management, slower growth, disengagement, and turnover.

Organizations should select managers for their desire and ability to develop people and teams. Mentors remain invaluable, and their work becomes even more powerful inside an intentional leadership system.

I have made many mistakes throughout my career. Strong mentors gave me perspective, and talented, driven people challenged my assumptions and raised my expectations. I learned from the people I reported to, those who worked alongside me, and especially those I was entrusted to lead.

Fingerprints

Coincidentally, the morning after the dinner event, I saw that a former mid-level software engineer from one of my teams had been promoted to engineering manager at his current organization. He had left our company several years ago, and I was genuinely happy to see the news and congratulate him.

He later came across my post about the books that helped shape me as a leader and influenced Profitable Engineering. He left this comment:

“I’m glad I saw this. In a 1:1 years ago, you once gave me a list of books that you recommended I read. Reading those has dramatically increased my ability to lead and teach.”

His comment reminded me that we rarely know which conversations will stay with people or how far their influence might travel. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to find out.

I can only hope I left more positive imprints like that one and that they help others continue developing as managers and leaders, then pass something even better to the people they influence.

Strong leadership leaves a visible imprint on the working environment. It appears in direction, feedback, trust, learning, and a team’s ability to perform while caring for its people. A familiar saying places the manager at the center of an employee’s decision to leave. It has endured because a manager so often determines how someone experiences the company.

That is why this age-old subject remains relevant. As long as people carry responsibility for the growth, experience, and performance of others, we need to keep discussing what good leadership requires and helping one another practice it.

How did you learn to manage people, and what do you wish someone had taught you sooner?

About the Author

Phil Clark is a technology executive, advisor, and author of Profitable Engineering: Transforming Technology Teams Into Strategic Business Partners (profitableengineering.com). His work focuses on helping leaders connect software delivery, operating discipline, and AI adoption to measurable business value.

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