Engineering Manager Role - Prioritizing Team Impact Over Popularity

My Job Isn't To Be Liked

What my team thinks I do as an Engineering Manager:

• Go to meetings
• Approve PRs
• Unblock people

What I actually did today:

• Handled an unexpected salary negotiation.
• Pushed yesterday's tasks to Friday.
• Had one painful meeting on making unpopular changes cause our team's pace is too slow.

Its not my job to be liked.
Its my job to increase my team's impact.

Sometimes those two are in direct opposition.

This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.
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