Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Coaching senior engineers to expand on their skill set and move toward ultimate proficiency requires many facets of your managerial expertise. 

Ensuring that senior engineers have the opportunity to keep growing has multiple compounding effects. For one, employees tend to stick around when they are satisfied and feel supported. Further, investing in senior engineer growth ensures a healthy pipeline for future technical leaders. By scaling them, you will increase your organization’s ability to solve hard problems and generate inspirational engineers that others want to follow. 

The key to developing your senior engineers is freedom. Liberation from the structures that supported earlier progression, but now confine their growth. Recognize that their needs have changed and adapt your approach to allow them greater autonomy.

From fluency to mastery

Whilst senior engineers develop fluency, mastery demands more maturity, creativity, and a broader perspective – producing results others can not. 

Those close to mastery are comfortable working in the full context of a problem – understanding user needs, exploring solutions, and considering long-term impact. This allows them to balance tradeoffs and find the right compromises for the business. 

Exposure to different patterns, solutions, and war stories means they can manage uncertainty and simplify complexity. They use technology to generate new solutions rather than letting their existing technological knowledge limit them. 

These engineers are skilled at listening, facilitating, and teaching. They use this to integrate others’ knowledge and generate ownership across teams and larger groups. They are also skilled in interfacing with different parts of their organization to understand the shape of the problem and how a solution would be most valuable.

How do you develop technical mastery? 

Mastery grows by doing. Specifically, it comes from building complex and novel software solutions that teach the lessons needed to solve hard problems. MIT states that mastery is built through observation, repetition, and feedback. To develop mastery, engineers need to go on ambitious missions and explore context, experiment, and of course, produce solutions. 

Most of all, mastery demands your engineers step out of their comfort zones and be exposed to new contexts and demands.

1. Ask big questions to fuel the journey forward

Some engineers have a natural orientation toward personal growth. They know where they want to go and why. Many don’t. Your job is to help them reorient themselves for their next step. 

Take time to understand their career or personal growth goals. Schedule an extended 1:1 and check in on their motivations. What would they most like to pursue going forward? Is the IC track what they want? Probe and gauge whether they are excited about their current work.

If they don’t know, find out who they look up to and what career options look most exciting. Ask them what they want to own and solve. Encourage ambition. 

Your next step is to light the fire by finding the work that will lead to growth. Warn them that the next steps can be big ones and they should take a measure of readiness. This will help you find the right size challenge as you shift to sponsorship.

2. Sponsor your report’s growth 

Senior engineering growth demands engineers step out of their comfort zones and be exposed to new contexts and demands. Folks supporting their growth need to harness sponsorship effectively as a tool. 

Sponsorship is a combination of coaching and mentoring. In addition to giving advice and asking probing questions, sponsors provide stretch assignments. This allows a senior engineer to learn the ropes authentically while retaining your support.

Take a look at where your engineers tend to focus and offer new opportunities. Give them challenges that don’t exactly fit what they do already. Get them involved earlier in the discovery process or owning bigger problems. Have them teach, grow new practices in others, and bring groups together to solve problems. 

Find places that suit their goals and personally take the role of the safety net that will allow them to fail and learn.

If sponsorship isn’t your strongest suit, find your report the sponsor they need. You can be the voice promoting your engineers to new work and helping them find new challenges.

from https://larahogan.me/blog/what-sponsorship-looks-like/ 

3. Coach the gaps

Once you’ve found your engineer a new challenge, you still have an important role to play.

Solving engineering problems requires broad expertise that goes beyond the technical. Success requires skills such as reporting up, collaborating and communicating across domains, and analyzing existing and failed solutions.

Some engineers are ready to engage with problems at an early stage and a higher grade. Others, whilst technically savvy, won’t be used to managing risks and stakeholders. This is where your skills in influencing need to be particularly sharp, so that you avoid micromanagement. Aim to guide – not solve – their problems and act as a mentor and coach. Help them stay on track by supplementing what they know with new methods and ways of working. This usually means working as a sounding board, suggesting where they might find the answers to their questions. 

4. Build a space where you both can be successful

I’ve warned against micromanaging, but with stakes in success, you may feel the need for control. So, how do you prevent that? Standard management rules still apply: discussion, collaboration, delegation, and – only when needed – direction. 

Discuss their approach and view of the risks, both in the delivery and their ownership ability. Find common ground on collaborating and choose the best way to delegate tasks.

Set up agreed check-in points where you both can assess how the work is going against expectations. Consider separating conversations about ongoing work from reflection and learning.

Above all, be sure to hold them accountable to their goals and their ability to solve the hard problems. Step in only when it’s necessary, such as when the complexity or risk has increased significantly and a new approach is required. 

Final thoughts 

Mastery is a challenging goal and can only be reached by someone grappling and owning their journey. Supplying reports with opportunities that matter to them and supporting their growth ensures they are sufficiently challenged and driven to build new paths toward proficiency.

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