Purposeful One-on-ones for Engineering Managers (Part II)
Breaking down lateral one-on-one meetings with your direct and adjacent peers
Hi readers, it’s great to be back in the writing zone after a short break to welcome a new baby into our lives! I expect the next several weeks to be somewhat irregular as our sleep schedules and routines fall into a rhythm.
My last post categorized the multitude of one-on-ones on an engineering manager’s calendar into Upward, Lateral, and Supporting buckets. This week, I want to dig deeper into Lateral One-on-ones and what makes them so unique!
Why are these important?
If you think about it, the operational aspect of the engineering management role comes down to shepherding the flow of information. For example, meetings that advance day-to-day work at a tech company like planning, hiring, staff, and retro meetings are all centered around people exchanging information. Engineering managers can add immense value by reducing information bottlenecks and information misdirection.
The best way to do this is by familiarizing yourself with all aspects of the business and understanding which key leaders are accountable for what slice. Setting up recurring one-on-ones with your lateral peers is a powerful tool for establishing strong communication channels that can be leveraged for troubleshooting information flow bottlenecks that routinely crop up.
Effective Lateral One-on-ones
Breaking it down further, there are two types — the first is with your direct peers who have the same manager as you, and the second is with everyone else.
Direct Laterals
This is your First Team, the one where your primary "loyalties" lie. (Sidebar, I recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which really digs into this notion and how to leverage it).
Investing in solid relationships with other engineering managers and tech leads on the same team as you comes with several benefits —
It’s easier to foster similar values across multiple engineering teams if the engineering managers are aligned.
Being able to access a wider pool of expertise for scaling your hiring pipeline.
For teams working on similar part of the product, being able to plan cross-team dependencies in a way that doesn’t make people want to pull their hair out.
Being able to help engineers who are looking to extend their influence outside of their immediate team.
A note on reorgs
Solid relationships with your direct peers also set you up with a softer landing when organizations grow and reporting structures evolve (fondly known as reorgs). I've experienced both sides of this, with peers reporting to me and with me reporting into a peer as a result of reorgs. The transitions were always more comfortable and effective when a healthy personal relationship was already in place.
Adjacent Laterals
This bucket includes everyone else who isn't your direct peer but is a key person in an adjacent organization. There is less common ground for establishing relationships with people from other disciplines than other engineering managers, so you will have to put in more effort for these to be effective.
An important fact to keep in mind when interacting with other leaders is that you may not appreciate the full extent of their role and all the forces shaping that role. For example, the person accountable for procuring software from vendors at a large company has incentives wildly different than those of an engineering team. Add to that, the person carrying out the procurement might be a temp contractor who is far removed from organizational incentives. An engineering manager with a good mental model of incentives and a communication channel with the accountable person can effectively align both parties.
As an example, here are some adjacent organizations for which you'd need to locate the right managers, leaders, and influencers -- Product, UX, Docs, Sales/Go-to-Market, HRBP, Community/Advocacy, Event Marketing, Support, Legal, Compliance, Security, Finance, Vendor Procurement, Recruiting, etc.
It's an extensive list, but there are some tricks so you can be effective with your time —
You only need to pick orgs that your team actually interfaces with.
Recurring lateral meetings can work well on a monthly cadence and also don't have to be perpetual.
A few relationships that you need to foster are somewhat seasonal. For example, event marketing may only need to be engaged toward the latter half of the year for tech convention season. Finance may only need to be involved during annual budget planning. And internship placement teams in the months leading up to summer, etc.
Once you've put in the legwork to build these relationships and communication channels, you don't necessarily have to re-establish them next season.
To recap, establishing solid relationships with direct and adjacent peers enables you to effectively mitigate information flow and decision making problems for your team. Smooth information flow makes the operational side of engineering management a breeze and leaves you with more time to tackle the strategic side of your role!
It's easy to de-prioritize lateral one-on-ones or not set them up at all, but over time the divergence of alignment creeps in and brings with it the potential for causing deeper problems — best to avoid this trap.
In the next post, I’ll write about Supporting one-on-ones. If you missed the first post on Upward one-on-ones, you can find it here. You can also subscribe to this newsletter by clicking —