Why should you start practicing your leadership skills before becoming a manager?
I completely get the frustration around a performance review conversation. The hatred around the “you have to be performing above your role before getting the promotion” (of course, without the extra pay) situation.
However, I still strongly recommend doing so in this case.
Having leadership skills is something that will help you in any step of your career. And I know that “leadership skills” is a wide umbrella. It can mean:
Fostering psychological safety within your team. You learn to treat everybody with respect and empathy, are mindful of your words and their impact, and help shine others around you by truly understanding them and sponsoring them.
Technically mentoring your more junior peers.
Communicating clearly with your tech and less technical peers. This helps you keep everybody on the same page, adopt the best tools and processes, and avoid friction in your product and tech team.
And, in my opinion, these skills are invaluable for every engineer expecting to grow to a senior role.
Especially because your first leadership role isn’t likely to be called “engineering manager”. Its name is probably going to look like something like “team lead” or “tech lead”. And this will likely mean that you will have to juggle responsibilities as a lead and as a software engineer for a while.
The part not overlapping is probably going to change depending on your organization. However, typically in a team lead/engineering manager role, you will also have to add two major things to your focus:
Project management in some shape (usually adopting the role of Agile coach)
People management
So getting as much practice as you can in these areas will definitely help you become a better manager in the future. (And who wants to have another bad manager, right?)