LeadTime#24 - New EM Feels There's Not Much To Do

What to do when you are not as busy as you expected to be? How should you switch working modes in this entirely new role of being an Engineering Manager?

Hi, this newsletter is a weekly challenge for engineers thinking about management. I'm Péter Szász, writing about Engineering Leadership and training aspiring and first-time managers on this path.

In this newsletter, I pose a weekly EM challenge and leave it as a puzzle for you to think about before the next issue, where I share my thoughts on it.

Last Week’s Challenge

Last week, I described a situation that might seem weird to some of you on the opposite end of the busyness spectrum: How to behave when you’re suspecting you’re not doing enough as a newly promoted Engineering Manager? Read the details here if you missed it.

This challenge was inspired by a now-deleted Reddit post.

I'll approach this question with my usual Goals - Risks - Questions structure:

Goals to Achieve

Switch from reactive to proactive mode: The main theme here is that you need to stop waiting for work to come to you and start creating value. This is the fundamental shift from IC to EM thinking. You are expected to do a lot of stuff that is not explicitly asked.

Build trust with your manager: You're new in the role, in a fully remote company - both factors make trust building harder. You need to ensure that your manager sees you as someone who's autonomous and capable, not someone who needs constant direction or approval. Similarly, you can probably increase trust with your team for the same reasons.

Reframe team independence as success, not failure: A team that doesn't need much intervention is actually a success metric for an EM, not a sign that you're redundant. The goal is to optimize execution, not to be constantly busy.

Grow your impact beyond your immediate team: Since you have bandwidth, look for areas where you can prove (and grow) your expertise: mentoring, cross-team initiatives, or just learning more about the business side of your organization that you were not familiar with.

Develop personally in this new role: Use this time to understand what success looks like for an EM at this company, and build the skills you'll need as the organization grows.

Risks to Avoid

Mistaking impostor syndrome for real problems: The feeling that you should be constantly busy to prove your worth is classic new manager impostor syndrome. Your value often comes from preventing problems, not just solving them, and that work is largely invisible.

Related: I wrote extensively about Impostor Syndrome felt by new Engineering Managers.

Overwhelming your bottleneck boss: The owner who "needs to think about everything" is a classic scaling bottleneck. This is where you need to start “managing up”. Rather than flooding him with more proposals, you need to make your requests easier to approve and build more trust first.

Missing implicit expectations: There might be expectations that you're not aware of, and failing to meet them. Small companies often don't have clear EM role definitions. Work on getting explicit feedback from your manager about your performance.

Assuming team quietness equals high performance: Your team being highly independent and rarely reaching out is generally a good thing, but in some cases, it might signal that they don't believe you can help them, or worse, that they're quietly disengaged. "Performing well without intervention" might be a red flag, not a green one.

Related: I had a full podcast episode about Quiet Quitting with Jeremy Brown.

Creating busy work instead of value: Don't fall into the trap of finding things to do just to feel productive. Focus on what would actually make a difference.

5 Questions

What are the explicit expectations of an engineering manager at this company? This is a small company, so they might not have anything written down — or even, enough experience managing managers. But if there's anything in writing, or if your manager or someone from HR can help clarify this, that's always a good foundation to ensure you're checking all the boxes.

How can I make my proposals more autonomous and easier to approve? Instead of saying "this is a problem we should fix," frame requests like concrete, full-fledged proposals with clear goals and success metrics. For example: "In the next quarter, I'm intending to experiment with [process change] because we see an opportunity to impact [metric]. I'll share how it went by [date], but please let me know by [date] if you disagree or need more time to decide." This defaults moves the path of least resistance for your manager from “no” to “yes”.

What would happen if I took a week off? This is a diagnostic question. If everything would run perfectly, it means you've built a resilient system. If things were to fall apart, you need to figure out why you're a single point of failure, and how can you distance yourself from the critical path.

How would I see if things are bad in the team? This helps you distinguish between healthy independence and disengagement. Would you notice if someone was struggling? If there was technical debt building up? If morale was dropping? If the answer is "maybe not," then you have some work to do in increasing visibility and deepening relationships.

How can I increase my understanding of the business to identify truly impactful initiatives? People coming from engineering backgrounds often lack knowledge of the business side. Maybe reach out to the CFO, CPO, or a more seasoned engineering manager peer to get a better understanding of the business, so you can identify what initiatives would actually move the needle.

The core challenge isn't finding more to do, it's shifting from reactive to proactive leadership and learning to create value in ways that aren't always immediately visible. Your worth as an EM isn't measured by how busy you are, but by how well your team and the people in it perform and grow over time.

Remember: if your team is truly performing well with minimal intervention, there’s a good chance you already do exactly what a good engineering manager should do. The discomfort you're feeling might not be a problem to solve, but an adjustment period to get used to a fundamentally different type of work.

This Week’s Challenge Summer Break!

I’m taking a few weeks off to recharge. It’s been almost half a year that I write this series, so I want to spend some of this time reflecting on where I want to take LeadTime in the future. I’d love to hear from you too! What value do you get from this series? What would you change? Do you have a challenge to share? Drop a comment below, send a chat message, or email. I’m grateful for your feedback.

Until then, here's a small piece of inspiration:

See you soon,

Péter