Engineering Managers: Grow Top Talent
Engineering Manager @engineering_bae advises growing top talent despite backfill risks shared, aligning with high-impact work, improving onboarding, and fostering psychological safety.
Here's a framework for aligning top talent with high-impact work: create a skills matrix mapping individual strengths to strategic initiatives. This makes it easier to identify the right people for critical projects and demonstrate their value to leadership. Improving onboarding involves setting clear expectations and providing structured mentorship. A 30-60-90 day plan with defined milestones can accelerate new hires' contributions and showcase your team's effectiveness to executives. To foster psychological safety, implement regular feedback loops and "blameless postmortems". Documenting lessons learned and demonstrating continuous improvement builds trust and allows you to highlight your team's resilience to senior management. Consider using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) when presenting your team's work in leadership reviews. This framework provides a concise, data-driven narrative that resonates with executives focused on outcomes.
