Leadership and Management: What's the Difference and Why It Matters

In engineering, we often use "management" and "leadership" interchangeably, but they serve very different purposes. Understanding the distinction helps clarify your role and improves how you guide people, systems, and outcomes. I highly recommend David Marquet's Turn the Ship Around! - not just for this topic, but for leadership more broadly.

What's the Difference?

Management is about planning, coordinating, and delivering. It's your calendar, your delivery process, your team rituals. It's about efficiency, predictability, and making sure work gets done well and on time, it:

• Plans and organizes
• Focuses on stability and consistency
• Measures execution
• Exercises authority
• Is about short-term delivery

Leadership is about inspiration, influence, and change. It's your culture, your clarity of vision, and your ability to motivate and align people around a shared future, it:

• Inspires and aligns
• Focuses on growth and improvement
• Communicates vision
• Builds credibility and trust
• Is about long-term evolution

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter Drucker

Navigating Leadership and Management in Engineering

The Expectation of Technical Expertise

There's often a default expectation that an Engineering Manager should be technical, someone who's come from a deep engineering background and can still jump in and do the coding. While that background can certainly be helpful, I think it's more nuanced than that. The role of the manager is less about being the most technical person on the team, and more about enabling the team to thrive (which can be done through influence, structure, and support rather than direct technical contribution).

From my perspective, if a business or community has strong technical people, the manager does not need to be deeply technical themselves. Instead, their effectiveness comes from building strong relationships with those technical people. These relationships become crucial in helping to mentor and grow the people they manage, not through direct technical guidance, but through facilitation, support, and by connecting them with the right people. They will also need to rely on those strong technical people to call out examples of both 'good' and 'bad' engineering, helping to uphold and evolve technical standards.

Balancing Technical Strength with Management Skill

Of course, having strong technical skills is valuable. Being strong technically myself, I have definitely found it to be useful in mentoring and problem-solving, as well as in building a potentially useful "one of us" relationship with engineers. But it shouldn't come at the cost of developing your management skills. Investing in how you manage, how you support, grow, and enable others is more important. That being said, I have found the most effective managers balance both, knowing when to step in and when to empower others to lead the way.

The Trap of Authority in Technical Influence

A common trap I've seen is that when a manager is - or has been - technical, engineers may defer to their technical judgement by default. This often happens not only because of their experience, but because of the inherent authority of the role. Yet, as a manager, your focus has shifted, you may no longer be the most current or technically strongest. This can unintentionally disempower others or bottleneck decision-making. A key leadership move is to actively redirect technical decisions to the right people and foster a culture where those closest to the problem lead the solution.

Both a Leader and a Manager

If you're a software engineering manager, you're doing both all the time.

• When you're creating roadmaps, tracking progress, or managing dependencies - you're managing.
• When you're mentoring someone, shaping culture, or influencing their decisions - you're leading.

The tension is real. In a high-autonomy team, you can't rely on authority to motivate people. You need trust, clarity, and narratives that resonate. This becomes especially important when you're influencing beyond your direct team.

Great leadership is often invisible. Often, the ideal is that the person or group you are leading feels that an idea is theirs, and not yours.

What Management Looks Like

Effective management provides clarity and accountability without friction. It shows up in:

• Templates and systems: Like epic, story, and bug templates that make expectations clear.
• Regular feedback loops: Through structured 1:1, retrospectives, and planning.
• Decision-making processes: Tools like Architectural Decision Records that improve alignment without slowing you down.

You manage to stabilize the system and make it repeatable.

What Leadership Looks Like

Leadership, on the other hand, is how you shape the why and the how, not just the what.

• It's knowing when to defer and deflect to protect team focus.
• It's about adjusting with humility when trying to enact change.
• It's cultivating a culture where people learn, improve, and take ownership.

Where management is about compliance, leadership is about commitment.

Simon Sinek's perspective on leaders eating last is a good read on this.

Success Doesn't Require Becoming a Manager

I've seen it repeatedly: people step into management not because they feel called to lead or support others, but because it's seen as the next step - a path to greater recognition or remuneration. But management is not just a promotion. It's a different job, with different responsibilities and demands.

I've had the pleasure of working with incredible technologists who chose a different path. They doubled down on their craft, or leaned into influential roles like Staff Engineer or Architect - roles that require leadership, but not management.

Choosing management for the wrong reasons often leads to poor outcomes - not just for the manager, but for the people they're meant to support. When we treat management as a reward, we devalue technical mastery and overlook the importance of leadership.

This becomes even more important as you move into managing managers. The skills shift from solving technical problems yourself to enabling others to thrive. Success depends on your ability to shape the environment, not just contribute within it.

Balancing Leadership and Management

• Manage when the goal is repeatability and reliability: delivery, hiring, prioritization, ...
• Lead when the goal is change and alignment: vision, growth, culture, strategy, ...

Engineering managers aren't just "leaders of people", they're custodians of systems, and systems need both stability and evolution.

When you move fluidly between leadership and management, consciously, intentionally, you build teams that not only deliver, but evolve.