The latest reports show a massive gap between leadership self-perception and HR/employee feedback, especially around burnout and clear communication. With every team getting new AI tooling, the Engineering Manager’s job is shifting from “managing people and process” to “managing a cognitive load explosion.” What is the one non-technical skill you’ve had to learn in the last 6 months to survive as an EM, and what did you have to stop doing to make space for it? My bet is on ruthless delegation of “admin” to focus purely on context-setting.
Non-technical skill? Easy: Corporate Theatre. I’ve had to master the 1-slide ‘State of the AI Adoption’ deck for the execs so they stop asking us for a weekly ROI report. It’s all a distraction. The real job is still unblocking a mid-level on a complex migration
The skill is Context Compression. Taking a 4-page product spec and boiling it down to a 3-sentence ‘Why This Matters to the Customer’ for the team. I stopped doing all my own code reviews. That is now delegated to other senior ICs—it’s their growth opportunity, not my workload.
I’ve learned to be a Facilitated Listener. I stop interrupting with my own solutions. Instead, I ask 4 deeper questions about the why of their AI-generated code. I stopped attending every cross-functional sync. If a ticket isn’t blocked, I let the IC handle the meeting