What is your management style? — The Load Balancer
The risk of delegating tasks only
In contrast to the article about Single Point of Failure (SPoF), I'd like to talk about the opposite style, Load Balancer (LB). The name is another terminology that initially came from the microservice universe, which is very popular in the IT industry nowadays.
What is a load balancer manager?
Essentially, it’s a manager who delegates too much instead of helping the team with their tasks.
There is an elegant analogy on the NGINX website that states:
“A load balancer acts as the “traffic cop” sitting in front of your servers and routing client requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.”
Don’t get me wrong, knowing how to delegate is crucial as a manager. However, keep in mind that if — or more precisely, when — you break, someone in the team could be overwhelmed while others might struggle to find out what to do.
It's easy for a manager who knows nothing about the team's problem space to become an LB. Your contribution at the very beginning would be to delegate tasks among the team members, invite them to some meetings, and ask them for help most of the time. It's natural and logical but dangerous if kept in the long run.
How to identify?
Let's try to identify if you match this style. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does the team struggle to decide who will do what when you are not there?
- Does the team complain about having many meetings?
- Do you usually feel lost when it comes to the team’s decisions?
- Do you typically struggle to do a task yourself and often need help?
If you say "Yes" to at least 1 of those questions, you are probably the team's LB.
Why does it happen?
The reasons may vary but not that much. I'll give you two reasons that I've seen:
- You are the less experienced in a team composed of more senior-level members working in the same team for a while.
- When you've recently joined a team as a manager (which is my case at the moment)
What is the impact of being a load balancer?
Like any other manager style, it's essential to understand its impact and sometimes even adopt it when necessary. During a short period, it works fine. Being an LB when you join a new team is an excellent way to start; take this opportunity to ask questions until you feel comfortable to begin contributing. However, suppose you insist on being that way for a more extended period. In that case, you probably lose the opportunity to help your team by sharing the workload or even making them frustrated because you are not helping very much.
Main takeaways
It's essential to have the right timing to move toward a more hands-on style. When you feel you are not helping, please do not conclude that this is not the right place for you (it's easy to do that, by the way). Ask for feedback. You could ask, "what do you think I should do to contribute more?". Everything it's a matter of managing expectations and frustrations. Be transparent with them, and show that it's temporary until you get up to speed. They will understand, appreciate your transparency, and support you on your journey.
You might be wondering when it's good to start being an LB. There is a case when you are looking for someone else to replace you in that position. As a manager, you must always consider if you have an excellent candidate to replace you. In that case, you could delegate the workload traffic to someone else little by little. This strategy is a perfect way to start onboarding a team member to take over your position as a manager. Again, never forget to be transparent about this decision and that you've been doing it intentionally.
As you can see, being an LB is not necessarily bad; sometimes, it’s expected, but not getting your "hands dirty" at all could decrease the team's trust in you. The critical point is understanding this style and knowing the right time to be applied. Finding the perfect balance is arduous, even for a traditional load balancer.
*** The main objective of this post is to help and inspire new Engineering Managers. There is beauty in this career path, and nothing makes me happier than encouraging others to follow it. If you liked the content, please comment and share it among others; anything helps me keep writing (which is my new passion). I’d love to hear your opinion about it ***
