The insane privilege of being a manager

You get to see the future by helping your team members set awesome goals

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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Your job as a manager is helping people become who they're capable of becoming. And if you do it right, you get the most incredible privilege: a front-row seat to watch human potential unfold.

I'm talking about personal goals. Not the corporate version where everyone wants to "develop leadership skills" but real, ambitious, life-changing goals that make people light up when they talk about them.

When you help someone articulate what they actually want to become, not just what they think they should want, you get to see their future self before it even exists. That feels like magic.

The moment I realised what I was missing

Two years ago, I was in a one-on-one with Jake, a mid-level backend engineer who seemed perpetually bored. Good performer, but checked out. I was doing my usual manager thing: "How can I help you grow? What skills do you want to develop?"

His response was the standard corporate word salad: "I'd like to become a senior engineer"

Instead of nodding and moving on, I tried something different. "Forget about the career ladder for a second. If you could wave a magic wand and be doing anything five years from now, what would that look like?"

His whole demeanour changed. He sat up straighter. His eyes got brighter.

"I want to build developer tools that make programming feel like magic again. Like when I was twelve and everything seemed possible."

Six months later, he'd started a side project building a local development environment that automatically synced with production data. A year later, he was leading the developer experience initiative. Today, he's the go-to person for tooling across the entire engineering org.

I got to watch Jake become who he was always meant to be.

Personal goals are not career goals

"Sarah wants to become a Staff Engineer" makes sense within the confounds of an engineering org.

Personal goals are different.

Career goals ask: "What's the next logical step?" Personal goals ask: "Who do you want to become?"

When Maria told me she wanted to "get better at frontend development" that was a career goal. When she told me she wanted to "build interfaces so intuitive that her grandmother could use them without help" that was personal. That was about the kind of impact she wanted to have on the world.

Career goals optimise for progression within the company. Personal goals optimise for personal fulfilment. And personal fulfilment is such a powerful motivator.

You get to see their future self

Here's the privilege part that many managers never experience: when you help someone set real personal goals, you start seeing them as who they want to become, not just who they are today.

I have an engineer on my team, let’s call him Alex, whose personal goal is to "understand systems so deeply that I can predict failures before they happen." Not "learn more about monitoring" or "improve debugging skills", but to develop an almost supernatural ability to see problems coming.

Six months ago, Alex would stare at our dashboards for hours trying to figure out why response times were increasing. Today, Alex in planning meetings casually mentions things like "This API is going to hit rate limits when we get our traffic spike next month" and suggests solutions before problems even surface.

What I love about it is that I can see where Alex is headed. I can see the engineer who will be architecting resilient systems, who will be the person other teams call when they need someone who thinks three failure modes ahead. I can see a future where Alex is known for building unbreakable systems.

I get to see the trajectory and the compound growth that happens when someone is genuinely excited about becoming excellent at something they care about.

That's the privilege. You get to see their future self even before they do.

The framework

After stumbling through dozens of these conversations, I've developed a process that I think actually works:

1. Ask the identity question. "Five years from now, when someone asks what kind of engineer you are, what do you want them to say?" Not what you want to be doing, but who you want to be known as.

2. Find the personal connection. "Why does that matter to you?" Keep asking until you get to something that makes their voice change. There's always a deeper reason.

3. Work backwards from mastery. "If you were already that person, what would you know how to do that you can't do today?" This creates a learning roadmap that's driven by purpose, not just skill acquisition.

4. Identify the forcing function. "What's a project or challenge that would force you to develop those capabilities?".

5. Make it visible. "How will we know you're making progress?" How will your thinking change? How will your approach to problems evolve?

The compound interest of human potential

When you help people set goals that align with who they want to become, something incredible happens: they start operating at a level you didn't think was possible.

I watched this with Priya, whose personal goal was to "become the kind of engineer who makes complex things simple for everyone else". Not "improve communication skills" or "mentor junior developers" but to fundamentally change how our team thought about complexity.

Within three months, Priya had started writing weekly short notes about parts of our codebase that were harder to understand than they needed to be. She began proposing refactors not based on cognitive load. She started asking "Is this the simplest thing that could possibly work?" in every design review.

The result? Our entire team's approach to building software changed. We started optimising for clarity. Our codebase became more maintainable, our onboarding process improved, and new team members became productive faster.

But here's what blew my mind: Priya didn't just achieve her goal, she transformed our entire engineering culture. And I got to watch it happen in real time.

Your team's potential

Most managers spend their careers managing the present version of their team. They optimise for current capabilities, work around existing limitations, and gradually improve what already exists.

But you have access to something far more powerful: the ability to see and nurture who your people are becoming.

When someone shares their real personal goals with you, not the sanitised career-ladder version, but the dreams that make them light up, you're seeing a preview of their future self. You're seeing what becomes possible when someone is genuinely excited about their own growth.

That's witnessing human potential unfold.

Stop asking your team what they want to do next. Start asking them who they want to become and help them get there.

That’s all, folks!

See you in the next one,
~ Stephane