Episode 5: More responsibility, less control and how the first team changes with Anita Singh
Sep 30, 2023
auto_awesome
Anita Singh, an engineering leader at Gorillas, discusses the challenges of transitioning from an engineer to a manager, managing managers in a hyper-growth company, building relationships and communication, balancing responsibility and control, and maintaining a support network.
Regular touchpoints and open communication with managers are essential for building trust and fostering a collaborative environment in managing managers.
Prioritizing relationships with peers from different departments is crucial for creating alignment, breaking down silos, and supporting the overall success of the business in the role of managing managers.
Deep dives
Building Trust and Communication
One of the main skills needed when managing managers is leading through interaction and building trust. It is important to have regular touchpoints with managers and create a safe space for open communication. By setting up rituals and touchpoints, such as weekly meetings and skip levels, relationships can be nurtured and feedback can be given. Being intentional about communication and actively listening to concerns and ideas helps build trust and fosters a collaborative environment.
Expanding the First Team
In the role of managing managers, the concept of the first team expands beyond engineering peers to include peers from different departments. Prioritizing relationships with these peers becomes vital in order to create alignment, break down silos, and support the overall success of the business. Regular communication and collaboration with peers from HR, finance, marketing, and other disciplines helps build a strong network and enables effective decision-making.
Navigating Middle Management Work
Managing managers requires mastering middle management work, which involves communicating decisions and feedback between different levels and departments. It is important to effectively communicate decisions made by leadership and ensure their understanding by all teams involved. Building strong reporting cadences and leveraging tools for collaboration and transparency, such as office-wide feedback and delivery tech metrics, contributes to successful middle management work.
Learning and Reflecting in the Role
Stepping into the role of managing managers comes with a learning curve and the potential for mistakes. It is crucial to give oneself grace and seek support from peers, mentors, and friends outside of work. Consistency is key in persevering through challenges and reflecting on mistakes to improve. Building a network of support and acknowledging both strengths and areas for growth helps navigate the transition and leads to personal and professional development.
In this episode, I chat with Anita Singh, who stepped into a managing manager role at the rapidly growing ultrafast grocery delivery company Gorillas and shared her experience of this in a talk at LeadDev Berlin 2022. We talk about the feeling of more responsibility but with less control and how the perspective of the first team changes.
Guest biography:
Anita is an engineering leader who is passionate about building mobile apps and empowering teams to build quality software that delights users. After spending a couple of years working for bigger public tech companies, Anita has since worked at startups in both Silicon Valley and Berlin, where she has scaled teams, culture, processes and software from the ground up. She enjoys coaching engineering managers and staff engineers in her current role and hopes to continue on this path.