How to grow your engineers into great leaders
summary
Claim: promoting top ICs fails because coding skill ≠ people management; implement tech lead rotations (one year to 18 months) with explicit one on ones, feedback and “air cover” and the result is more ready managers. Measure leadership debt as company complexity outpacing leader growth. Hire mistakes are common; mitigation includes identifying early signs (ownership, hunger), giving ambiguous but bounded projects, and acting as sponsor not advisor. Concrete next step: pick one candidate and one gap and run the experiment.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:52Promoting engineers to managers
- 5:04Building people systems
- 8:18Scaling with tech leads
- 10:46Short vs long-term leadership
- 13:14Early leadership potential
- 16:43New managers support
- 18:51Grow future leaders
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