Impact and Result-driven Approaches

A key aspect of an engineering manager’s role is keeping the team motivated toward achieving its goals. This entails the impact a manager has on his team and the organization. Ultimately, a manager's impact is what the team’s impact is, and so the team’s success is the manager’s success. Moreover, a result-driven approach makes setting up team goals, defining success criteria, and tracking these goals easier.

An impact and result-driven manager will go a long way both in managing people and projects with the following approaches:

• Communicating a clear direction and strategy for the team.

• Motivating and inspiring their peers and team members.

• Establishing, tracking and meeting milestones, and measuring success after their completion.

• Building a trusting relationship with their team members.

• Helping develop and grow their team members

Attributes of an impact and result-driven person

Let’s look at some key qualities exhibited by an impact and result-driven person:

• Strong execution: A person with a strong execution plan creates milestones, sets expectations with team members, and keeps the team focused and productive. They have a framework for breaking the milestones further into smaller epics or tasks and then finding appropriate owners for them.

• Handles setbacks: A good manager will handle setbacks positively and recover from them to deliver most of the projects. For example, suppose your team starts building a project, and halfway through, you realize that your approach is not working. An EM should be able to devise a solution or a work-around in minimum time, get their team on board, and be able to recover from the situation. They should be able to come up with a solution, navigate the team, and keep the team environment healthy and productive.