5.1. Why Self-Awareness is Your First Skill as an Engineering Manager

Self-Awareness is the key to outperform at the workplace. 🎁 4 days of activities to start practicing self-awareness. Join us in the Thriving🌟Challenge!

What You'll Learn:

💡 The importance of self-awareness for companies and teams.
💡 Self-awareness from the lenses of a people manager.
💡 Practical tools for improving the self-awareness of your team and yourself.

Tasks for the Week:

☑️ Practice self-awareness activities from the Thriving Challenge with your team.
☑️ Send the below self-awareness quiz to your team, where you can rate each other.
☑️ In your next 1:1 ask 1) what they value in you and 2) what actions you take that annoy them.

Self-Awareness at the Workplace

Companies with more self-aware employees, from IC to top-level executives, significantly outperform — revealed a research by Korn/Ferry Instititude. As tech leaders, we have to be aware to succeed. Yet while 90% of people believe they're self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. We can change and become aware leaders. It’s a journey that I am still following.

This week in the Thriving Challenge, we are practicing self-awareness. Self-awareness allows us to understand our emotions and thoughts. It is the first step to own the actions that will make us thrive in our goals! With self-awareness we can improve our performance and overall job satisfaction of ourselves and teams.

Suresh Choudhary

from

Diary of an Engineering Manager

, is a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce and believes in the advantages of self-awareness, for himself and his team. He embraces self-awareness daily and influences changes in his team that make people succeed. Want to know how? Read on, he is sharing his learnings next. Suresh, over to you.

Self-Awareness as a People Manager

As an Engineering Manager, you manage three things: yourself, your team, and the work. But the first thing you need to manage is yourself.

One morning, I got pulled into a meeting about a production issue. The on-call engineer, visibly annoyed, walked us through the root cause. It turned out to be a change another team member had made. He muttered in a frustrated tone:

“This was so obvious, right?”

He raised his eyebrows and then shook his head in disapproval. He was clearly blaming the other team member.

That triggered me. My first instinct was to snap back.

“What if you had made the change? Would you like being blamed like that? Can we act more like a team instead of pointing fingers? Shouldn’t we focus on understanding why this was missed?”

If I hadn’t been self-aware, I would have said all that aloud. And the meeting would have gone downhill from there. It would have turned into a yelling match because emotions were high on both sides.

Your Leadership Debugger

That's why Self-Awareness is such an important skill to have as a manager. Without self-awareness, you’re flying blind. It’s like trying to debug code without logs or a stack trace. You can’t fix what you don’t understand. You can’t manage others if you can’t manage yourself.

Self-awareness helps you recognize:

• What triggers you and why.

• What communication is working (and what isn’t).

• How your behavior affects your team and vice versa.

That day instead of reacting, I caught myself. I paused. I looked away, opened my notes app and started writing my thoughts. This allowed me to process those thoughts better. With my emotions in check, I could now think clearly: How do I get the outcome I want without escalating this further?

So I asked about the next steps and moved on. In my next 1:1, I gave the engineer direct and constructive feedback. He took it well.

If I had yelled that day in the meeting, this behavior change wouldn’t have happened.

How to Master Self-Awareness

For me, self-awareness has become the foundation for empathy, better decision-making, and effective leadership. It has helped me catch my blind spots and make meaningful improvements.

It’s not easy, but it’s a skill you can develop:

• Notice your emotions and pause before reacting.

• Reflect on conversations that didn’t go well. What made you angry or sad? How could you have handled it differently?

• Seek feedback to know what others observe about your behavior.

When you show self-awareness, it also encourages your team to do the same.

You can also take the coaching approach to make team members think about their behaviors and emotions.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Why is it important to you?”

Next time around, they will mentally ask these questions themselves first, making it easier to take the right action.

The idea of self-awareness is to observe, process, and respond with intent.
This is how you manage yourself first. This is how you thrive when working with other people!

Special thanks to Suresh for sharing his leadership insights. Follow his journey on LinkedIn and also on his newsletter.

Self-Awareness Week in the Thriving🌟Challenge

Connect with other leaders practicing self-awareness this week in our Substack chat. Share your experiences, get daily exercises, and practice them within the challenge. The week is not over yet! You can still join and start practicing to become an aware, thriving leader.

Ready to Thrive in the next 30 days?!

Challenge Recommendations

Day 1 - Define your Values and Strengths

During this month you will align your goals with your values and strengths. They will become the compass of your actions. 🚀 One tip: You likely admire the people who exhibit those values in their day to day lives. Join the chat and share your values with

Marion with Animalsofa

,

Artur Henriques

, and myself.

1. Define your core values and strengths. Share them in a comment or chat.

2. Read Self-Assessment: Knowing Your Why Leads to Your Dream Job

Day 2 - Start Practicing Self-Awareness

With self-awareness we will be able to control our thoughts influenced by our values and emotions. This control will increase the likelihood of success towards our goal for the next 30 days! After the activities, don't forget to share how you felt in the process.

1. Reflect on how you feel today and what the triggers were. Take notes.

2. Journaling: At the moment you feel an emotion, dive into what situations or thoughts triggered those feelings from the present or past.

3. How do you live your values today? Write down 1-3 real examples. (e.g. one of my values is kindness, and I am running this challenge to share what I know)

4. Read "Self-Awareness: First Step to Your Career Plan and Thriving as a Leader?"

5. Watch "Increase your self-awareness with one simple fix" with Tasha Eurich.

Day 3 - Mindfully Identify Your Purpose

As leaders, we need to be intentional. To be able to thrive, we need a sense of fulfillment, and for achieving it, some of our goals and actions should be aligned with our purpose and mission. Today you will mindfully identify your mission, passion, vocation and profession in your life and career through an Ikigai exercise.

1. Keep reflecting on your day.

2. Find 2 moments to breath for 2-3 minutes each. Breathe before reacting to a triggering moment, before starting a meeting, or through a guided meditation.

3. Find your Ikigai, the intersection between 1) What You’re Good/Skilled at, 2) What Others Need, 3) What You Get Value From, and 4) What You Love. Reflect, and share your ikigai in the chat or comments. Is your job and life aligned with it?

Day 4 - Ask for Feedback

We have blind spots; the people who we think we are might not be the people others see. What you say or you ask others might not be aligned with your actions. We need feedback to uncover what we don't see and increase our self-awareness and growth.

1. Take the Insight Quiz to identify how self-aware you really are. It includes an assessment from someone who knows you well. — Dr. Tasha Eurich.

2. Ask for feedback from a peer, direct report, and supervisor. Use it for continuously improving performance and detecting blind spots. Getting feedback is a gift.

3. Enumerate 5 things you are grateful for and keep taking notes of how you feel.

4. Watch The Power of Self-Awareness illustrates the transformative potential of giving and receiving feedback. — William L. Sparks

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Do you have any learnings that you would like to share? I am looking for guest posts from different tech role writers so that we can get different perspectives. Join here or send me a DM or an email to patri@develagora.com.

Do you want to connect? You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

This post opinions are Suresh and my own, and may not reflect the opinions of the companies we work for.