We looked at ways to track engagement on a single team or for a larger organization in the last two weeks.
This post covers a few broad themes that affect engagement. If you are mindful of these themes and avoid a couple of landmines, you'll see engagement naturally drift in a positive direction. Positively engaged engineers who are having a great time at work ship the best software!
Career Paths
Engineers, like everyone else, like being on a career path that's going somewhere — advancing in their role, exploring adjacent roles in product or engineering management, achieving deep mastery of a narrow field, founding their own company, etc. The more you can support them in their chosen path — or sometimes, help them find that path — the more positive engagement it will foster.
As manager, you can ensure that each person you directly support has a five-year vision for their career and their current role on your team connects to that vision somehow. And if it doesn't, be supportive of them finding a different position that does connect to their vision.
The career path is usually the first area I explore when interacting with someone who appears to be less engaged than their peers.
Collision Course
Building on the theme of career paths, a reason that causes a drop in engagement is if engineers can foresee their career path imminently colliding with someone else's on their team. It turns career development into a zero-sum game — affecting engagement and fracturing the team morale. As manager, you should make sure everyone on the team has enough room to grow and also that everyone knows this. It also has the neat side effect of resulting in a more generative culture with abundant innovation and ideas.
For example, you have a mid-level engineer showing initiative and ownership on a project. If you add a senior-level engineer to the same project without expanding the scope, you may see a drop in engagement for one or both engineers.
Everyone you support should have something appropriate to their level that they can take ownership of — it could be an API function, a software component, a library, a service, a process, or an entire product. When you have to compete with others to take ownership, it becomes a zero-sum game that negatively affects engagement.
In our example, we could explore a few alternatives: getting an architect to provide oversight and guidance to the mid-level engineer's project while leaving ownership intact or adding junior-to-mid-level engineers to the project. Of course, everything isn't straightforward in real life, and as a manager, there are times you'll have to choose different trade-offs between meeting deadlines and career development.
Slaying Dragons
Engagement increases when the team has a "dragon to slay" — for those of you who haven't heard this flavor of tech jargon — a dragon is a large and complex problem that is unsolved and undefeated until the team in question brings victory by slaying it.
Structuring this is easier than you'd imagine. As manager, it requires you to understand and synthesize two pieces for slaying the dragon.
The first is to see the dragon — packaging the task to outline its impact in a way that everyone understands clearly. For this, it helps to stick to basic themes like cost savings, customer satisfaction, competitive response, breaking into a new area, giving the customers what they're asking for, etc. The good news is that most projects that teams undertake generally touch a number of these themes.
Framing the problem and clearly articulating its impact helps those outside the team understand what the team is undertaking. Everyone knows what a dragon is and how it's either tormenting a town or guarding a treasure — that's what makes slaying it appealing. Appealing work contributes to positive engagement.
The second part is to slay it — clearly defining how the team can solve the problem. In the dragon's case, the problem is considered solved when the dragon is dead. In your case, it could be the launch of a product, when it has a larger market share than a competitor, when profit margins increase by a point, when NPS goes up by such and such, etc.
Aim for a crisply defined solution that, once provided, allows the team to declare definitive victory. The motivation to slay the dragon and emerge victoriously also contributes to positive engagement — but only while it's alive. Thankfully, there are plenty of dragons for those who know where to look for them.
What’s Next
This post is the third in a series on engagement. Next week's post will uncover a few more themes that affect engagement positively and negatively.
As managers, tracking and measuring engagement is an ongoing activity so that we can swiftly take action when required. Some easy ways to keep up with engagement levels on your team were covered in the first two parts —