Software development managers can support their most valuable asset—people—with these seven tips.
In my recent article on hiring and retaining developers in a hybrid working world, I shared several recommendations, including improving communications, committing to diversity, and enabling work-life balance. Leaders should increase their engagement with teams while trusting and empowering individuals to do their best work. These are important leadership goals, but they may be hard to translate to the daily interactions between software developers and delivery managers with their agile teams. So, for this article, I asked technology leaders to share their recommendations for development managers, team leads, devops leaders, and data scientist managers. They contributed several dos and don’ts to improve engagement and productivity without micromanaging. Ravs Kaur, CTO at Uplevel, knows that development managers are always under pressure to deliver more features every release and sprint. Her suggestion is to balance the drive with empathy and to establish a human connection. She says, “An engineering manager can support their team members in many ways, like mapping out goals and having open communication, but the most impactful thing a manager can do is be empathetic.” Kaur recognizes that the pandemic has brought empathetic leadership into the spotlight. “Over the last two years, we have seen how intertwined our personal and professional lives are, and, as a manager, it’s crucial to understand that everyone has challenges and needs that require empathy. Without this human connection, team members will feel disconnected, unhappy, and eventually leave.” Going one step beyond empathy requires software development managers to recognize the symptoms of people burning out. Signs of burnout include decreased productivity, increased cynicism toward colleagues, and a sense of detachment from the company. Dawn Parzych, manager of developer marketing at LaunchDarkly, believes that development teams can reduce stress by utilizing devops tools and practices. She shared a recent study showing that 91% of software development professionals who lack processes, such as using feature flags, report feeling stressed during deployments.
