👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
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A mid level engineer is working on a big feature.
They bring an ADR to present to the team. It looks to be well thought out and they spent quite a bit of time researching all different angles.
During the architecture review session, your senior engineer immediately spots flaws and reasons why it wouldn’t work. So in order to save the team some time, they raise them immediately and essentially send the mid level engineer back to the drawing board.
After some collaboration between the two, they agree on the design.
But you sense your mid level engineer has lost some motivation and excitement.
It’s likely tied to the fact the senior kinda shut their idea down. Of course, you want your experienced engineer to raise concerns, but you also want to hear people’s reasoning before these concerns are raised.
It can be tricky giving this feedback though. I can already hear their point: “Would you rather I let the team make a bad decision?”. The answer is no!
You need their judgment to steer the team, and you also need other people to keep using theirs.
Get specific
You need to do this for constructive feedback. Especially when it’s a bit nuanced like in this scenario.
Was it the interruption that caused the issue? Dismissing someone else’s ideas? Doing so without fully understanding them?
You want to nail the exact thing.
You also want to think about how the conversation is likely to unravel. Will they kick off? Are they argumentative? What is their point of view?
If people are being impacted by one person’s behaviour you need to get to the bottom of it ASAP.
Ultimately the message you want to portray is that they need to give people a chance to finish sharing their thoughts and fully understand an idea before judging it.
In the next sections I am sharing:
the exact conversation I’d have in the 1:1
what I’d say if the engineer pushes back
what I’d do after that conversation
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