Here's how you can learn from your peers and colleagues as an engineering manager.

Accepting opportunities to engage with peers and colleagues at business events, professional organisations, and online forums can lead to essential knowledge sharing and advancement. This proactive approach broadens our perspectives while also providing us with new insights and unique solutions to complicated engineering challenges. By actively participating in such platforms, we can collectively enhance our profession and drive substantial gains for society as a whole.

I have found that having a 360 degree feedback process is a great way to get feedback on your performance from peers in other functions. Engineering managers getting feedback from sales and from service managers can go a long way in understating the customer's perspective and can lead to better designed products from the team.

The best way to improve is feedback. Peers are the closest ones. They can be brutally honest with you. You need to build the trust beforehand. Ask for feedback when possible and not stick only with tech but on soft skills as well. Listen to them and don't judge. Try to understand the perspective and where it is coming from. Act accordingly to be better.

I had set up a daily 30 minute meeting for 3 of us to learn - 1 person from sales, 1 from accounts and me from engineering would find topics that we need to improve on in our jobs and surprisingly, there were a lot of common training programs we found online that worked well for all three of us from very different role and departments. I also had a quarterly presentation by one of my team members on something they have learned in the past year that has helped them get their work done more efficiently. It could be with respect to a tool, with respect to a process and the presentation would lead to the others in the team to also align themselves to the same or to give their perspectives that might be even better.

It is always about collaboration. Find chances such as group brainstorming sessions or others to collaborate and try to understand each other better. You need to be open to inputs. Give a chance to each individual to be themselves. Don't listen for formality but take them seriously.

What worked for me and my peers. We visited the meetings of each other and regularly discussed the activities we are doing. Every week we synced to give the feedback to each other and the insights how my or their processes can be improved. This helped us to polish our skills, exchange knowledge and learn from each other's problems.

Mentoring can help to build relationships between people from different backgrounds and experiences. This can lead to new friendships, professional opportunities, and a more connected community. Then there is this winning proposition of "Reverse Mentoring" opportunities as well. If you are a Gen X or Gen Y leader, you can work alongside your Gen Z team mates closely where you can learn a lot about trending technologies and new age customer trends from them. The way internet has democratized learning in this knowledge economy, there is no dearth of opportunities in finding the right mentor for you. As an Engineering manager, consider paying forward by being a mentor to someone and help them achieve their goals, and reach their potential!

You do not need to be an expert to be a mentor. Mentor comes in different forms. Mentorship helps both sides. It opens so many new perspectives. It makes you a better person. Being a mentor to someone is a fulfilling feeling. Seek for mentorship. Right mentorship is invaluable.

Mentoring is helpful for both. For mentor to improve coaching skills and polish their knowledge resolving new puzzles. For mentee to improve the skills and close gaps. Mentoring many different people helps to understand different perspectives and can reveal the new solution for well-known problem.

I enjoyed the role of being a mentor and ensured that I spent time with new members of my team to walk them through the entire game of tools, processes and projects we work on when they started working with me. That helped me stay in touch with the actual daily workings of the group and also brush up on all the things we do and see if there was scope for improvement. When a new project or initiative was begining in the company, I would be the mentee and try and assimilate as much information I can, as my engineering team would be the one executing the project. Both roles and critical and knowing the be both mentor and mentee can help a manager to grow.

I would ensure to have lunch with different people each day to ensure that I would have interaction with people from different departments. This also helped me build my network and get a lot of insights into things I wouldn't be able to learn about in my regular job. Our monthly management meetings also brought in a different perspective for me with respect to sales, marketing, operations, after sales and accounts which I found a great knowledge building session for me.

Learning from peers and colleagues as an engineering manager involves actively engaging in collaborative practices, seeking feedback, and participating in knowledge-sharing activities. For an instance, managers can regularly participate in tech talks, and guilds focused on specific areas like data engineering or user experience - to share best practices and innovative solutions, enhancing their management and technical skills and experiences on managing technical teams and projects.