Empowering Employees Through Opportunities

I'll start this one off by saying I absolutely despise the word "opportunity" in a corporate setting. Throughout my 17 years working in software engineering there have been so many times where tasks or positions that I had no interest in were sold to me as opportunities. That being said, my current manager will often remind me that just because something is an opportunity, it doesn't mean it is the right opportunity for me. I mention all of this, because I want you to know that I will be using that word many times in this article and will wince every time I type it.

One of my biggest responsibilities as a manager is to empower my employees to succeed and to grow in their careers. Empowering employees can take many forms, but today I'm going to discuss how I empower through opportunities. While I may be biased, I believe that I have one of the best groups of software engineers on the planet. I have been trying for several years, but still have not found the limit of what they are able to accomplish.

Currently, I have 9 full time engineers reporting to me which can make it a challenge to ensure that I am identifying and providing enough opportunities for all of them to succeed and grow. Over the past couple of years, I have developed a habit of looking for opportunities in every task, project, or interaction that might be the right opportunity for one of those 9 engineers. Below are several examples of opportunities that have provided value to my engineers:

• Interviews/Hiring - Involving my engineers in the interview process not only gives my team a voice in who we hire, it also provides them the opportunity to learn the process and work on communication skills
• Interns - My team absolutely loves working with interns every summer. This provides an opportunity to work on their communication and coaching skills. It also provides an opportunity to identify a project, work through breaking down the work, as well as making design and implementation decisions
• Project Planning - Taking an idea from a product manager and architect and breaking it down into small chunks that can be estimated and implemented is a skill that takes A LOT of practice to get good at. I include engineers every time a new project comes our way and try to spread it around to different people on the team each time
• Engineering Reviews/Design - A great chance to work on system design knowledge as well as documentation and presentation skills
• Communication With Other Teams - Whether it is communication with product, operations, SREs, or another engineering team, being able to effectively communicate and work through issues with peers is vital to the success of any engineer and team
• Onboarding - This is one of my favorite opportunities to delegate. The person onboarding is required to field questions that they won't always know the answer to. This will often mean they have to reach out to other people to get answers. Another great tool for practicing communication skills

I'm sure that there are many more, but hopefully you get the idea from those examples.

To wrap it up, I'm going to call back to my opening paragraph and leave you with a critical piece of advice. It is extremely important that you take the time to learn as much as you can about each of your employees. Understand what they are interested in and what they don't like to do. Ask them where they want to go in their career. Check back in on these things often, every 6 months to 1 year, as they will change over time. This is important, because as you identify opportunities, this will help you to ensure that you are giving the right opportunities to each person.