Module 1: Developing your team

Pillars of Engineering Management

As a manager, part of your role includes developing the engineers in your team. And when you look for ways to do this, you’ll probably come across the idea of mentoring.

But studies have shown that mentoring alone often doesn’t help to progress people in the way we hope. But there are ways we can move beyond mentoring to effectively help people grow: coaching will help them consider their own experiences and analyse their challenges, while sponsorship will provide additional growth opportunities for the folks on your team.

Module 1 takeaways and homework

You’ve learned

Teams are more than just managers and direct reports at a fixed time. Management is about ensuring you’re providing your team with opportunities to grow in multiple directions and ways.
Developing your team is about helping individuals grow to the next level of their career by sponsoring them and providing new opportunities, providing coaching so they can really grow and learn from these opportunities, and making sure that they are in a healthy, well-rounded environment so they can learn from one another and thrive together.
Coaching is about exploring problem-solving together and finding the best path forward for the person you’re talking to. There’s no prescribed way to do it, but it’s about how you help people think critically about who they are as people and what they want to do next in life.
Sponsorship is all about providing opportunities and helping individuals build that network to be able to get people to have the best in their careers.

You’ve discussed

Changes you’d make to help you better develop your team
How you, with your newly formed peer group, can help each other develop both your and your colleagues’ teams.

You should now

Be able to understand the difference between mentorship and sponsorship
Be able to identify the skills you currently have on your team as well as the areas your team struggles with as well as identify opportunities that are needed to help your team develop
Have a toolkit to build a team that can grow complementary skills for a long-term, self-sustaining team

Homework

Sponsorship could often be undervalued and not exercised enough. And in Catt Small’s sessions, you learned concrete steps on how to do sponsorship well. Time to put your words into action!

Take your notes from Catt Small’s session ‘Their career: sponsored by you! And in your team, identify two mentees that you can help sponsor.

What opportunities are on the two months horizon where you can sponsor them?
Can you introduce them to someone in your newly formed LeadDev Together group to help with sponsorship opportunities?