How to Position Engineers for Leadership Roles

How senior engineering roles are actually filled (what no one tells you) After helping dozens of engineers land leadership positions, I've learned that the traditional approach to networking fails at senior levels. Here's what really works: 1. Stop collecting random connections. Start building a "brain trust" of 5-7 deep relationships with peers at your target level. These become your sounding board, insider guides, and eventually, your advocates. 2. Contribute meaningfully to technical communities before you need anything. Senior engineers who regularly share learnings in Slack groups, contribute to open source, or solve problems on GitHub build credibility that recruitment posts never can. 3. Document your engineering approach publicly. Writing thoughtful posts about technical decisions, architecture patterns, or leadership philosophies gives hiring managers insight into how you think—which matters more than your resume. 4. Master the "problem-focused" conversation. When meeting engineering leaders, avoid asking about job openings. Instead, ask about their current technical challenges and offer perspectives. These exchanges demonstrate your value naturally. 5. Find the "kingmakers" in your desired organization. These aren't recruiters or hiring managers—they're respected senior engineers whose technical opinion carries weight. One referral from them outweighs 50 applications. 6. Develop specialized knowledge in emerging areas where talent is scarce. Becoming the go-to person for a specific technical domain creates inbound opportunities when companies need that expertise. 7. Join technical decision-making forums. Participating in architecture reviews, RFC discussions, or technical design panels positions you alongside senior engineers and makes your transition to their level feel natural. 8. Create leverage through comparative knowledge. Engineers who can speak intelligently about how different companies solve similar technical problems bring unique value to senior discussions. 9. Understand the "hidden org chart" Who actually influences decisions versus who has the formal authority. This insight comes only through relationship building. 10. Be deliberately visible during company inflection points. Major product launches, technical migrations, or strategic pivots create opportunities for external experts to engage meaningfully. The traditional networking advice—attend events, send cold messages, ask for referrals—works for entry and mid-level roles but falls flat for senior positions. At senior levels, you don't get hired through applications. You get hired because the right people already know your value.

A lot of Drilling Engineers wait for a title change before they start demonstrating leadership. The problem is, promotions usually go to the people who already show leadership in their current role. You don’t need “Lead” or “Supervisor” in your title to stand out. Here’s how to show leadership in a way that hiring managers and recruiters notice. ➤ Take ownership of one performance improvement Leadership shows up in your ability to make things better, not just run the plan. Example: If connections are slow or weight to weight time is dragging, lead a small improvement effort with the rig team. Track the before and after. Even a 5 percent gain proves capability. ➤ Be the person who closes the loop Leaders follow through. If you identify a problem, make sure it gets resolved and documented. Then share the lesson learned with the next rig, the next pad, or the next drilling engineer. People remember the person who doesn’t let things die in email. ➤ Build strong working relationships with the rig Leadership in drilling starts with respect on location. If the rig crew will call you first when something feels off, that’s leadership. It shows you communicate well, listen, and act fast. Titles won’t fix weak field relationships. ➤ Help early career engineers or interns grow If you’re guiding others, you’re already leading. Example: Walk a junior engineer through the morning call prep, show them how to think about performance, or let them lead part of the after-action review. Helping people level up is leadership at any stage. ➤ Think beyond your well Leaders think systemwide, not one well at a time. If you fixed something on Well 4, apply it to Wells 5, 6, and 7. Then share that improvement with another asset. This is how decision makers start seeing you as someone who can lead programs, not just wells. Showing leadership before you get the title puts you ahead of the pack. Most people wait. The ones who step into it early get tapped for bigger roles. #oilgas #oilandgas #oilandgasindustry #energy #careers #drilling #leadership

Here's the leadership strategy that propelled me to Principal Engineer at Google: "I push rocks down hills." This is the pithiest summary of Principal Engineer-ing that I've come up with, and it's a major part of how I approach exec-level engineering leadership. Moving up the career ladder as an engineer is about finding leverage: ways to produce more value per unit of time. You can grow your skills so you can handle harder projects and finish them faster. You can improve your judgment so you identify opportunities that produce more value for the effort. You can lead teams, so your skills and judgment get magnified across more contributors. One way to magnify your output as a leader is by turning a hard problem into an easy problem. Something I've observed over time is that it's a lot more challenging to start a project than to keep a project moving in the same direction. The first few commits, the project outline, the high-level architecture: these are the hardest and the most consequential challenges. Once the skeleton is in place, it's harder for a project to run off the rails. Starting projects is hard; maintaining that momentum is comparatively easy. This leads to the discipline of pushing rocks down hills. Your goal isn't to drive a project to completion; it's to impart enough momentum to the project that it will cross the finish line even if you stop paying attention to it. The goal is to build teams that don't need you. Don't build teams with yourself at the center: build teams with yourself on the outside. Once a problem is moving under its own momentum, it's no longer a high-leverage place to spend your time. You can move on. It's time to push a different rock down the hill. One consequence is that you will start more projects than you finish. Not because the projects *don't* finish, but because *you're* not the one driving them over the line. You need to have the humility to step back and give credit to the folks who finish the job. Scaling yourself means taking a smaller share of credit for a larger number of projects.

My Principles for Being a Hands-On Engineering Leader As I've grown from an IC to leading engineering teams at scale, I've developed strong beliefs about technical leadership. The "founder mode" discussions that swept through leadership circles few months ago made me reflect on my own philosophy as an engineering executive. Here's what I believe: Engineering leaders must maintain technical credibility while focusing on strategic impact. My core principles: 🔹 Leaders should deeply understand system architectures and technology stacks to make informed strategic decisions 🔹I actively participate in design reviews, not to dictate solutions but to ask probing questions that surface hidden risks 🔹I maintain enough technical currency to evaluate emerging technologies against our business needs 🔹Know your system health dashboards - when incidents occur, I can step in with the technical context to drive effective resolution 🔹Occasionally, I'll dive deep to unblock critical initiatives or validate concerns when truly needed The balance shifts dramatically with company stage - in early startups, everyone - with AI tools literally everyone - is coding. At 15+ engineers, I think the manager shifts from coding to being in the code. As the team grows beyond 35, focus shifts primarily to architecture, strategy and organizational design. What's been transformative recently is how AI tools have helped me quickly understand codebases, analyze incident channel chatter, and digest detailed design docs. They've become an essential part of staying technically connected while scaling my impact. Being "hands-on" isn't about writing code daily—it's about maintaining enough technical insight to provide valuable guidance while creating space for your team to execute and grow. What principles guide your technical leadership approach? #EngineeringLeadership #TechnicalLeadership #EngineeringCulture

The Hidden Shift Every Engineering Manager Must Face When I transitioned into engineering management at Microsoft , I thought the key to success was rooted in my technical expertise. After all, I had spent years mastering code, designing solutions, and owning deliverables. But soon, I learned a lesson that reshaped my entire career. Early in my new role, I tackled the team’s technical challenges head-on, diving into problem-solving the same way I did as an engineer. Yet something felt off. Despite delivering solutions, I noticed gaps in team morale, alignment, and overall performance. One day, a mentor pulled me aside and said something that stuck with me: “You’re solving the wrong problems. Your job isn’t to code the solution—it’s to build the team that can do it better than you ever could.” That was my wake-up call. I realized that engineering management is 80% people and 20% engineering. My real role wasn’t just in technical delivery—it was in unlocking the potential of my team, fostering trust, and building alignment. Here’s what I wish I had known from the start: • Engineering management is about translation, not execution. Your primary task is to bridge strategy with systems, ensuring your team is aligned to business outcomes. • Your technical skills take a back seat to your leadership skills. You need to guide, coach, and empower—not micromanage. • Conflict resolution becomes more important than debugging code. Navigating team dynamics is the new challenge. At Amazon Connect today, I carry forward these lessons. The technical wins still matter, but the true legacy lies in the people I help grow and the culture I help shape. So here’s my question to you: What was your wake-up call when transitioning into leadership? What lesson reshaped how you approach your role? Let’s share our insights—because leadership, like engineering, is a skill you can always refine. #EngineeringLeadership #PeopleFirst #GrowthMindset

It took me 13+ years to climb the ladder as a college grad to an engineering manager. Here are ten mindset shifts I made that helped me go from junior to senior and manager+ roles in this time (hard-learned lessons that you should remind yourself of from time to time) 1️⃣ From "Doing Everything Myself" To → "Focusing on What Truly Matters" - As responsibilities grow, your time becomes limited. Focus on high-impact work that aligns with your team’s and organization’s goals. - Shift from task completion to prioritization. Ask: "Will this make a meaningful difference?" 2️⃣ From "Relying on Gut Instincts" To → "Documenting Strategies to Scale" - Writing clear engineering strategies helps align teams and provides a long-term vision. - Your ability to scale isn’t about working harder. It’s about making your thinking accessible to others. 3️⃣ From "Fixing Every Bug Personally" To → "Curating Quality Through Standards" - Ensure software quality by setting up frameworks and processes instead of micromanaging every detail. - Empower your team to own technical quality and create scalable systems that evolve with the organization. 4️⃣ From "Going it Alone" To → "Staying Aligned with Authority" - Leadership depends on trust and alignment with the organization’s goals and vision. - You can disagree, but do so constructively and ensure you stay predictable and dependable. 5️⃣ From "Pushing Your Vision" To → "Blending Vision with Others" - Leadership isn’t about imposing your perspective—it’s about integrating the best ideas from peers and leaders. - Collaboration strengthens outcomes and earns you buy-in across the board. 6️⃣ From "Being Right" To → "Focusing on Understanding" - Stop spending energy defending your ideas. Instead, prioritize clear communication and collaboration. - The ability to bring people together with empathy is more valuable than winning arguments. 7️⃣ From "Competing for the Spotlight" To → "Creating Space for Others" - Leadership is about elevating others. When your team succeeds, you succeed. - Share responsibilities, mentor others, and celebrate their wins to build a stronger collective. 8️⃣ From "Relying on My Judgment" To → "Building a Peer Network for Feedback" - Surround yourself with peers who can challenge your decisions and give honest input. - The higher you climb, the harder it gets to receive constructive criticism—actively seek it. 9️⃣ From "Only Mentoring" To → "Sponsoring Talent" - Mentoring is guiding someone. Sponsoring is actively advocating for their growth. - Create opportunities for others to showcase their skills and step into new challenges. Key Takeaway: Technical skills alone aren’t enough to climb higher, you need to shift your mindset. Which of these mindset shifts resonates with you the most? Share your thoughts below! 👇

Two leaders. Same technical background. Same years of experience. Leader A gets pulled into every technical decision. Spends days in architecture reviews. Known as the go-to person when systems break. Respected by engineers but rarely invited to business strategy meetings. Leader B has similar technical credentials, but his calendar looks different - customer impact reviews, competitive analysis sessions, and business strategy meetings. Delegates many technical decisions. Focuses on outcomes rather than implementation details. Trusted by engineers but also sought out by business stakeholders for strategic input. The difference? Leader B learned something that transformed their entire career trajectory. They discovered that tactical mastery becomes a trap if you can't zoom out. When you're the person who knows every system inside and out, you become indispensable at the tactical level. But that same expertise can keep you locked in operational mode while others move into strategic roles. The breakthrough happens when you realize that your tactical knowledge gives you credibility to think strategically, not an obligation to stay tactical forever. You can understand the technical constraints AND envision new possibilities. You can appreciate implementation complexity AND prioritize based on business value. You can respect engineering excellence AND make difficult tradeoffs. This isn't about choosing sides. It's about operating at multiple levels simultaneously. The most successful technology executives I work with use their tactical foundation to inform strategic decisions. They ask questions like: "Given what I know about our technical debt, where should we focus next year's innovation budget?" or "Based on our current architecture, what new business capabilities become possible?" Your technical depth becomes a strategic advantage when you learn to connect it to business outcomes. What's one area where your deep technical knowledge could inform a bigger strategic decision in your organization? #TechLeadership #TechnologyLeadership #Technology #Leadership

The qualities that get tech leaders promoted have almost nothing to do with the qualities that make people want to follow them. Technical excellence. Architectural knowledge. Delivery track record. That's what gets you the title. But I've watched brilliant architects with empty teams. And average engineers with people lining up to work for them. The difference comes down to three things. They see you. Not your output. You. A VP I worked with had a habit that seemed small. When an engineer started explaining something, he'd close his laptop. Mid-sentence. Every time. Full attention. An engineer told me later: "He's the first leader who actually listened. Not waiting to respond. Actually listening." Presence is a choice to treat someone's time as worthy of your full attention. Most leaders fail here because the structure works against them. Forty direct reports. Back-to-back meetings. Slack notifications competing for every second. Presence requires fighting the current. The leaders people admire fight it anyway. They protect you. From chaos. From blame. From pressure that isn't yours to carry. A Director of Engineering I know never let her team hear about executive drama. When the CEO demanded an impossible timeline, she pushed back in rooms they'd never see. When the deadline held, she negotiated scope in ways they'd never know. Her team thought projects just had reasonable timelines. They had no idea what she absorbed to make that true. When the deployment failed, she owned the process publicly. When it succeeded, she named the engineer who fixed it. Credit flows down. Blame stops with her. Most leaders fail here because protection is invisible. The executive who pushes back looks like an obstacle, not a guardian. The performance review doesn't have a line for "shielded team from organizational chaos." The incentive structure punishes protection. The leaders people admire do it anyway. They lead somewhere. Clarity about where you're going. Decisiveness when paths diverge. Courage to choose the unpopular route. Engineers don't need leaders who know every technical answer. They need leaders who can say "we're going this direction" and mean it. A CTO I respect canceled a feature three weeks before launch. Product was furious. Sales had already promised it. But his engineers were drowning and shipping it would have broken them. He took the heat. They kept their weekends. And their respect for him compounded. Most leaders fail here because decisiveness requires vulnerability. Choosing means being wrong publicly. Research feels safer than commitment. Consensus feels safer than direction. The leaders people admire decide anyway. Three things. See them. Protect them. Lead somewhere. Technical skills get you the title. These three determine whether anyone's glad you have it. ♻️ Repost and comment if you've worked for someone who did these ➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leadership that earns followership

9 out of 10 engineering leaders reverse their emotional intelligence at the worst possible moment. They micromanage when teams need space. They vanish when teams need technical leadership. The pattern shows up everywhere: The VP who rewrites code during sprint planning but goes silent when production burns. The engineering director who can't let teams architect solutions but disappears during crisis calls. This costs you everything: Your best engineers leave because they can't grow, then watch you vanish when things break. Your team's trust erodes. Your credibility becomes situational incompetence. Here's what changed my understanding completely: 3 AM. Huge retail client's entire payment system crashes during their biggest sales day. $50K bleeding per hour. Team paralyzed. Junior developer hyperventilating. Senior architect stuck in analysis paralysis for 2 hours. As Solutions Architect, I had a choice: Stay in my "leadership lane" and coach from the sidelines. Or violate every management book and dive into the code myself. I grabbed my laptop. Found the database deadlock in 20 minutes that they'd missed for hours. System restored. Revenue bleeding stopped. Client saved their biggest sales day. But the real impact wasn't the fix. The team watched a leader step in without blame during the moment that mattered most. That night taught me the framework that separates adaptive leaders from rigid ones: Your emotional intelligence requirements flip based on the situation. Same leader. Completely different EQ skills. CRISIS MODE - Lead from the front: ↳ Self-awareness: Recognize when your technical skills matter more than your title ↳ Humility: Code-level problem-solving regardless of organizational chart ↳ Ego management: Solution over status, every single time ↳ Calm under pressure: Your stress becomes their panic - manage it ↳ Technical empathy: Feel the weight of what your engineers are carrying NORMAL OPERATIONS - Lead from the back: ↳ Trust: Your team solves it better when you're not hovering ↳ Patience: Growth happens slower than your impatience wants ↳ Restraint: Keep your hands off the keyboard when fingers itch ↳ Active listening: Hear the problems they're not saying out loud ↳ Psychological safety: Failure becomes learning when you're not judging ↳ Empowerment: Autonomy with availability, not abandonment Get this right: teams innovate fearlessly and execute flawlessly under pressure. Get this wrong: teams stagnate during calm and collapse during crisis. Your comfort zone isn't what your situation requires. Crisis demands technical courage. Innovation demands emotional maturity. Before you step in today, ask yourself: Does this situation need my technical skills or my restraint? ♻️ Share this to your network. 🔔 Follow Dan Tudorache for leadership insights that match what your technical team actually needs right now.

Your best performer can end up being your worst promotion based on the fundamentals of the Peter Principle. The principle was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian educator and sociologist. If you’ve ever worked in a startup or scaling business, you’ve probably seen it in action (maybe without realizing it). Here’s the core idea: “𝘐𝘯 𝘢 𝘩𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘺, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦.” Let’s break it down with an example. You’ve got Nancy, a great backend engineer. She ships code fast and is easily the most productive dev on the team. So, what do you do? You promote her to Engineering Manager. Suddenly, she’s drowning in team meetings, giving feedback, managing performance, and planning sprints. She’s not shipping much code anymore. And worse — she’s struggling, frustrated, and questioning herself. Not because she’s not brilliant. But because she’s now being measured on skills she was never trained for. The truth is that most of the time, companies promote based on loyalty or performance in a previous role, not readiness for the next one. CEOs think “promotion = reward,” but in reality, it can be a trap — for the person and the team. Put someone into the wrong role, and you don’t just lose productivity. You risk losing a high performer, damaging team morale, and creating leadership blind spots. So what’s a smarter play? 1) 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬: not everyone wants to lead people. Build parallel tracks: one for leadership, one for deep technical or functional expertise. Let folks grow without forcing them into management. 2) 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐢𝐭, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬: don’t confuse gratitude for performance with readiness for leadership. Look for signs they want the next challenge and have the raw tools to succeed. 3) 𝐓𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐩: Give stretch projects, team leads, or shadowing opportunities before making it official. Promotion should feel like the next logical step, not a cliff. 4) 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬: if someone does step into leadership, back them up with training, mentorship, and peer support. Leadership is a skill, not a prize. Treat it that way, and you’ll build stronger teams and keep your top talent engaged. Founders, ask yourself: Are you promoting people to reward them — or to set them up for success? Managers, take stock: Who on your team is being measured by skills they never signed up for? Get intentional. Your team (and your business) will thank you.