Collaborating With Leadership

Engineering managers have a challenging job that involves managing complex collaborations with various stakeholders, including their colleagues, XFN partners, and leaders around numerous projects and priorities. Collaboration with leadership is one of the very important pillars for engineering managers for their team's success. Collaboration with leadership includes collaboration with their own managers, skip-level managers, directors, or the vice president. This also includes collaboration with other senior leaders in the organization or cross-functional organization.

Why you should collaborate with the leadership

There are multiple reasons why an EM should build a strong collaboration with the leadership. There are many communication channels to build collaboration with leadership, e.g., 1:1 meetings, group meetings, and asynchronous communication via messaging or email. Usually, EMs have engaged with their own leadership more actively, but it's often a good idea to stay engaged with the XFN partner's leadership as well. Meetings with leaders from important XFN partners at some regular cadence is a good way to build a strong collaboration with them. Good communication with leadership is essential for a team's success.

Strong collaboration with leadership is important to establish a channel with leadership to listen to their ideas and seek guidance from them. Engineering managers should also get constant feedback from the leadership about any new ideas, projects, and challenges. Business and project reprioritizations must be communicated with your manager and senior management as soon as possible. This will give us a good amount of reaction time to adjust to and handle the situation more efficiently.