Breaking the Mold: How Simple Framing Can Build Engineering Leaders Out Of Engineering Managers

Aspiring engineering leaders rely too much on their technical prowess to climb the ranks. But, what got them here won't get them farther without effective communication skills

Aspiring engineering leaders are generally strong with technology. They are great at solving technical challenges in the workplace. They are trusted to uphold operational and engineering excellence. They've risen in the ranks particularly due to it being their strongest suit. Over time they choose to chase a different career path in management more often than not. But excellent technical abilities isn't enough if an engineering manager keeps damaging the work environment with their poor communication practices. With some time in the role, they even realize communication as a key skill to hone and understand not all communication is the same. They value building trust and providing psychological safety through conversation and open feedback. Still when asked how often they spend the time honing this skill, we see that managers devote very little time. Why could that be?

In my experience, conversing with aspiring leaders, I've noticed that managers tend to classify communication as a soft-skill and dismiss as something they'll get better with time. In other cases, they resign to the fact that English is a second language and that they'll never get better at it. Both are extreme and inefficient takes. Especially, if you believe that a great engineering leader commands respect by communicating an inspiring vision or providing critical yet constructive feedback which is typically driven through effective strategic communication. So, you've got to be intentional and not leave it to eventuality that you'll get better over time.

That said, a majority of the managers get better and hit a plateau on communication maturity quickly. Sadly, they are not able to get beyond that due to a lack of direction, resources available to them or a sense of purpose and eventually giving up. Particularly, they struggle in outward communication i.e., to their peers, stakeholders and leaders above. They do not understand how with simple tweaks in their message could’ve landed that project or the management scope they wanted or deliver a hard but inspiring message to the employee. These simple tweaks are often referred to as Framing. Business management literature refers this as Strategic Communication. In essence, it is the practice of expressing the same message that identifies mutual value and reinforces trust between the parties involved.

However, many people misunderstand framing, seeing it as manipulative and insincere. They believe that bending the truth to achieve a desired outcome is dishonest and undermines trust. But with the right approach and mindset, framing can be a powerful tool that inspires great results and separates good leaders from great ones. Let me share a story from my own experience. I was just preparing to share annual performance ratings to one of my directs. The employee is a sincere, hardworking and a strong technical leader in the organization. Nevertheless, they have areas of improvement and this time I was about to deliver a hard message that did not reflect their true potential. I could have gone any number of ways about it. Just praise them for their contributions and deflected the conversation completely or objectively provide them exactly where they succeeded and where they failed. Either of those messages would not have yielded what I'd have wanted or put the employee back on a successful performance trajectory. By ignoring the growth opportunities, the employee will be in the dark about their performance and will continue along the same performance curve and develop a false expectation. By being only critical about the performance, I'd have discouraged them from trying new ideas faster and experiment. At the same time sandwiching the feedback, dilutes the urgency and effect I'd like for them to create. So here is what I tried.

We started off discussing the hits from the year first. When discussing, I reminded them about the behaviors that helped us achieve the results. That is, instead of saying "you were awesome", I kept reminding them about their positive behaviors e.g., "remember how you engaged the leader proactively to align on this big decision..." and “remember how you presented both arguments to drive a critical decision with leadership before the important launch…”. This allowed the employee to reflect how some behaviors can have a positive influence and certain other behaviors can have a negative effect. It already helped them somewhat disconnect from themselves and see themselves from a different plane. By the time, we started talking about the misses from the year, the employee was already open to talking about how they could've moved faster, amplified impact. Instead of saying, "you missed delivering x", the conversation turned to "remember how you brought the team along when you wrote the tech strategy - could you've done something similar when you proposed designing x". It even got the candidate to open up to provide some actions of their own. The employee got a clearer message of the expected behaviors and I was able to get the employee exactly where I wanted. You can see how when you focus on the situations and behaviors, the employee went from taking it personal and received it gracefully. And that simple tweak is the difference between an energized employee wanting to do more and a dissatisfied employee less engaged at work. This isn’t a ground-breaking or earth shattering idea. It is in fact a widely researched and documented behavioral science topic. But managers often overlook or are simply unaware.

Framing as a technique can be applied to drive organizational changes too. Some common situations you'd have seen leaders use framing as a tool effectively is when talking about failures. Leaders often use cliches e.g., we haven’t failed, we've just found a way that might not work. Great leaders, however, see opportunity in failures and frame it to drive big strategies. Jeff Bezos, the then Amazon CEO in an interview with The Washington Post's executive editor, after the infamous Fire phone failure said this, "If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding. And some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip....The great thing is when you take this approach, a small number of winners pay for dozens, hundreds of failures. And so every single important thing that we have done has taken a lot of risk taking, perseverance, guts, and some of them have worked out, most of them have not." The company has gone on to sell 100s of millions of smart speakers taking lessons from Fire phone's failure. But it needed a great leader to come out and change the narrative and give his team the confidence to think big, fail fast and deliver results for their customers.

Just as you can see, it is not about manipulating people or bending the truth, but about crafting messages in a way that inspires and motivates them to achieve great things. But these simple tweaks don’t come naturally to everyone. You've got be intentional about it. So how can i get better, you ask. I’ll share some ideas in my next post.