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A piece of simple, concrete, implementable advice I read recently that I really like is "communicate in the language of options , not demands, imperatives, requests, or preferences." Imagine yourself having a conversation with your manager or someone in a relatively similar position about a decision or suggestion you have. How often do you say things like "we have to", "we need to", "we really should", "can we", or "…
Talking like a manager primarily means to focus on time and money. How much does it cost/save/earn? How long will it take? Just two numbers. At least managers would like it to be that simple. It isn't and that makes the translation between management and engineering hard.
You still must try to answer the questions though. Pick a random open bug or feature: How long will it take? How much value does it bring to the company? If you can answer both questions precisely in a sentence you should be fine. You probably cannot. Now try harder. What has to change so you can? Just get some info from someone? Change fundamental processes in your company?
Now you have work to do. Before you start doing that, ask again: What is the value in dollars? How long will it take?
Oh, and put a limit on the recursion there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often say to me “it must be nice not to have a boss.” I explain to them that I have no idea what that’s like, since I have 12 or 13 bosses. My job is to empower my reports to do their best work, using empathy and engineering the team as a well-oiled system. Sure, they report to me, but my job is to keep them productive.
Sorry if I sound harsh but I disagree extremely strongly with this. If you are evaluating someone's work and you can fire them, then you are their boss. There is a trend of calling managers "supporters" where I work, and I absolutely can't stand it. It seriously reminds me of "War is Peace" from 1984. I don't mind having a boss; hierarchies are fine. But I feel extremely patronized and condescended to when people try…
What you're asking here can be massive career changer and lift you up from a skill perspective. Many business types have not much idea how your world works but if you can bridge over into theirs it will certainly open doors.
After a while you might see a huge contrast when comparing to HN, reddit and technical mailing-lists or any chat & digital channels. While "growing up on Usenet" can give you an edge with reasoning / arguing in the technical world, it can massively backfire in business.
Everyone in the business world I know makes their connections IRL (and not online). So having hobbies that get you off your screen and into real human groups would be a boon.
Have answers rather than questions. Many posters pointed out that it is good to provide options as potential solutions. But this may not be leadership. Engineers love options because we are creative and options are opportunities to experiment. The problem is that we need to be bold when a decision must be made. A decision is explicitly closing off our chance to explore all but one of the options. This is tough leadership.
(We need to know when it is time to make a decision and when it is a time to explore options)
But again, the language is only a fraction of it. It's how you handle situations. When you change your approach to problems then your language changes as well. I'd highly recommend reading some books. The two I've read in the past month and really liked where "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin and "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" and Patrick Lencioni Both books give examples of how they handled situations, and you begin seeing patterns in the speech they use.
You don't need to negate your engineering skills, just acquire leadership skills over them. You will need:
-Skills about people, phycology types, influence, procrastination, deals and negotiation skills.
-Knowledge about the "Forrest" perspective of your business, in engineering you will have deep knowledge about the trees. It doesn't matter if you do a perfect job if you do the wrong job. If you do you will fail, and your best people will leave soon.
-You need caring about your people(the people on your team). Isolate the blame on yourself(and your system, change your system when things go wrong) for all errors of your people. Give credit to them when things go well.
People know when you care about them, they sense it. This overpowers anything you say.
In today's business it is all words about how the most important things in the business is its people, and they they trow their people under the bus. You can even joke and say all day you don't care about your team that if they know you care it doesn't matter.
This is very easy to state and say, but it requires years of practice and lots of mistakes before you are good at this. Focus on improving one skill at a time and log improvements on a notebook or something.