Leadership Reads: The ultimate list of books, articles and newsletters for people managers
A list of resources that I have found useful in navigating my work as an engineering manager and executive and that I recommend to anyone starting out in a new manager role.
Last updated on: April 4, 2024.
Books
Primers to Engineering Management & Leadership
James Stanier: Becoming an effective software engineering manager
Julie Zhuo: The Making of a Manager. Solid primer on management.
Camille Fournier: The Manager’s Path, if you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend starting with this one, as it covers the basics of Engineering Management and how to progress from there. It also works as a go-to for looking things up in from time to time.
HBR guide to managing up and across: It's a skill, and this guide has a ton of information on managing in all directions, and how to develop the skills to do it well - highly recommend.
Special-interest books
Elad Gil: High Growth Handbook. Is your company growing fast and you want to learn from others who have done it before you? This is for you. I don't agree with everything in here, but it provides useful direction and nudges in a time that's often quite chaotic.
Michael Bungay Stanier: The Coaching Habit. Great book on coaching-style management (which I'm a huge proponent of).
Strategy
Fred Pelard: How to be strategic
Richard Rumelt: Good Strategy - Bad Strategy
Delivery
Marty Cagan: Inspired, Empowered. Very good books on delivery, in particular for leaders in product organizations.
Mik Kersten: Project to Product. Offers useful approaches for a challenge many teams struggle with: How to get from a project- to a product mindset and delivery approach.
Leading leaders & organizations
Liz Wiseman: Multipliers – How the best leaders make everyone smart. Great book on growing leaders around you.
Patrick Lencioni: The Advantage – Why organizational health trumps everything else in business. Really liked this on how to build strong organizations and teams.
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais: Team Topologies. A classic already. I particularly love the approach of defining interfaces and interaction patterns between teams
Robert Anderson & William Adams: Scaling organizations. Great mix of inspirational content and practical tips for leadership in high-growth times.
Communication
Kim Scott: Radical Candor. Great book on building relationships, trust, and strong feedback culture.
Erin Meyer: The Culture Map
Newsletters
Melissa Perri's newsletter is aimed at Product Managers, and as someone who works with Product Managers a lot, I found it an excellent resource.
The Engineering Managers Slack is a great community. I only follow a few channels there, but sometimes find discussions there really useful (and have also used it to ask for advice in the past).
Inclusion at work. Great (and important) reads.
Josh Radnor has a very good newsletter with musings that have nothing to do with engineering leadership, which is even more of a reason to read it.
Transitioning into engineering management
What to expect from moving into management
Engineering Management: Lessons learned in first year – Good post about what to expect, and how to shift your mindset over your first year as an engineering manager
Starting out
This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers – A very good primer that can help you make a plan together with your own manager
The Brutal Truth About Why Being a Leader Is So Hard (I find the title very annoying, but the article really good. It focuses on the flexibility required from being a good manager, and on adapting to the people you work with, which I find one of the cores of the work)
Managing culture
Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish - another all-time favourite of mine
How understanding loss helps you manage culture through change
Guide to allyship (I think that effective ally work is an important part of inclusion)
Organizing work
Meetings
1:1s are key to much of your work, so it's important to make them useful. 101 questions to ask in one on ones. I'm not a fan of all of them (personally, I don't use the "Personal Life" section normally), but there are a lot of great ones in here.
I always found it useful to be deliberate about also managing my own boss. This article has some useful advice: How To Manage Your Boss -- Ten Dos And Don'ts.
On Feedback
When It Comes to Feedback, Start with Yourself: A Manager’s Guide for Effectively Giving Feedback
Another Way to Motivate Employees: Try Building a Culture of Praise
Further reading materials
How to Lead People and Be a Manager – An extensive collection of documents about how-to management, from philosophies, transitioning into management, 1:1s, feedback, culture, time management, to hiring and conflict resolution. While it's a lot to read, I find it a useful document for looking things up when needed.
This thread by Marc Hedlund with management advice is one of my all-time favs
Should I move from maker to manager, or not?
Over the years, I had many conversations with folks who were interested in management-type roles, but not always sure whether these roles would be for them (and that's okay, there's only so much of an accurate impression that your imagination of working such a role can give you). Here are some posts that I think describe the differences well:
"Look up into space and imagine a space ship. What would excite you the most? Being the person who wrote the code? Being the person who architected the system? Being the person who managed the team?" — This Quora thread has a lot of good responses.
Do you have what it takes to be a manager? A good outline of core competencies.
So, you want to be a manager? A coaching conversation. - This post is a guideline for managers whose reports want to step into management, but lists great questions that can be useful to go through by yourself as well (or have someone actually coach through this topic).
Being an engineer <> manager can be a pendulum and doesn’t have to mean a permanent career choice:
Why I Left Management: the engineering technical track vs. management track
The engineer/manager pendulum, and as a longer article here. - Fwiw, I don’t agree with all of Charity’s points - I do think that engineer and manager require distinct skill sets, and that a shift isn’t always super simple. But I also know of many folks who move between maker and manager role every few years (and that’s just my anecdata), in order to mix things up and apply different skill sets.
If you want to familiarise yourself a bit more with what EM vs. Staff roles look like in the day-to-day (and the huge variations within these roles/titles), here are two good resources:
