I read The Engineering Leader.
A practical book by Cate Huston aimed at leaders of engineering organizations.
The book is organized in three parts:
- Part I "About yourself": being the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your own career, energy management, and recognizing failure patterns as a manager
- Part II "Teams": scaling hiring, effective 1:1s and onboarding, building a bench for the next generation of leaders, mission/strategy/tactics/execution, and self-improving teams
- Part III "Conclusion": what "good" looks like
The scope expands stepwise from yourself to your team to continuous improvement.
It starts from the premise that "a great engineer is not automatically a great leader" and lays out, in plain language, the typical traps new managers fall into. The sections on the "I want to help" trap and on burnout are especially useful as a checklist for inspecting your own behavior.
Part I in particular reads as much as a book on career as on management. Framings like "become the DRI of your own career" and "lower your expectations of your current job, and raise them for your career" land just as well for engineers who want to take the wheel on their own career, not only managers.
Each Section (Part) closes with an "action plan," which makes it easier to bring the abstract takeaways into your own context. This is a book to apply against current problems rather than skim.
A title to revisit periodically alongside books like The Manager's Path.
