Communication
As a manager, you must communicate with each master you serve. For each action or event that affects you or your team, you should be thinking about to whom and how you communicate it. It doesn't matter whether the item is positive or negative.
You must also learn to communicate in different ways with different constituents. For example, you might do formal presentations for your boss's boss, but be more casual with your direct reports. Or you might use e-mail for officially documenting agreements between you and your peers, but need face-to-face meetings to explain that agreement with its rationale and implications to your developers.
Here is a second set of 10 questions with which you can grade yourself on communication:
- Does your team understand your company's strategy?
- Does your team understand engineering's roadmap?
- Does your team understand why the roadmap meets the goals of the strategy?
- Do you have regular communication meetings and e-mail with your team?
- Are people on your team willing to tell you bad news?
- Do you hear information about your team from your team before you hear it from others?
- Do members of your team communicate with each other and the rest of the company in a respectful manner?
- Do you provide information to your boss before he or she has to ask for it?
- Do other people in the company know what your team is doing and accomplishing?
- Do you communicate in a positive fashion?
How you communicate is as important as communicating itself. The attitude of your words, the respect for those with whom you communicate, the body language or inflection of voice, or choice of words all contribute to whether you communicate well. Cynicism, sarcasm, and negativity could remove all of the advantage you might otherwise realize by communication.
Unlike being a developer, a large part of your job is interacting with people. Just as my final words on communication reflect a care you must have in communication, you must also show care in how you treat your team and peers. I searched for the word that represents this skill, and "empowerment" came to mind.
