TALKS

Finding Leadership Confidence in Community

Claire Reckless

Making the move to a leadership role is exciting, challenging, and often, just a little bit scary. Leadership can be a bit of a lonely place sometimes, and if you’re completely new to an Engineering Management role you might need some support in finding your feet, and cultivating your confidence. The role of Engineering Management was introduced at Moneysupermarket in 2021 and gave a number of us in Technical Lead positions the chance to progress our careers further, but as a completely new function, we had to start from scratch and work out what that function even looked like.

In this talk, I’ll share how our internal Engineering Management community has helped those of us completely new to the role, and how it’s benefitted even those of us in our collective who have more leadership experience. I’ll talk about how we worked together to define how we would operate, as a group and as individual leaders. We all need help navigating those difficult people situations, or just sense checking our ideas, from ways of working to whether someone is ready for a promotion, and having a group of people who you know are also learning similar lessons and tackling the same issues has really helped combat that sense of Imposter Syndrome and increase my own leadership confidence.

With a focus on how you can use your Engineering Management community to share knowledge , best practices, solve tricky problems, and sometimes just give each other a boost, this talk will remind you about the power of community, and the value of not trying to do it all on your own.