As an engineering manager, it’s easy to get trapped in the cycle of managing people and tasks—the individual “plants” in your garden. You track progress, unblock issues, and manage performance. While essential, this approach doesn’t scale and won’t elevate you to the next level of leadership.

The most powerful shift you can make is to stop focusing solely on the plants and start acting as the gardener: the designer of the entire environment. Your job isn’t to make every plant grow; it’s to create a garden where growth is the natural, inevitable outcome.

This means you shift your focus from outputs (tasks completed) to inputs (the system that produces those outputs). Here’s how to start:

1. Enrich the Soil: Your Team’s Culture and Psychological Safety

Instead of asking, “Is this task done?” ask, “Is my team’s environment one where work gets done effectively and happily?”

• Action: At your next retro, dedicate the entire session to the question: “What is one thing slowing us down as a team that is outside of our direct control?” Listen for patterns related to fear of failure, unclear ownership, or friction with other teams. Then, make it your #1 priority to fix one of those systemic issues. A psychologically safe team, where engineers can take risks and admit mistakes, is the fertile soil from which all success grows.

2. Control the Climate: The Flow of Information and Context

A plant can’t thrive without sunlight and water. Your engineers can’t thrive without clear business context and well-defined problems. Don’t just be a conduit for tasks; be a fierce guardian of your team’s focus.

• Action: For the next project that comes to your team, refuse to let them start until you can clearly articulate the “why” behind it. Write a one-pager that answers: What customer problem are we solving? How does this align with our company’s quarterly goals? What does success look like (and how will we measure it)? Give your team the gift of clarity. This single act transforms them from code monkeys to problem-solvers and aligns their work directly with business impact.

3. Provide the Right Trellis: Your Systems and Processes

Great gardens have structure that supports growth. Your engineering organization needs lightweight, effective systems that make excellence the path of least resistance.

• Action: Pick one recurring point of friction in your team—code reviews that drag on, an ambiguous on-call process, or inconsistent technical decision-making. Work with your team to design a simple, documented process for it. Don’t impose it; co-create it. The goal isn’t bureaucracy. It’s to remove cognitive load and create clear, agreed-upon pathways for common tasks. This is how you build long-term technical excellence into the very fabric of your team.

By shifting your mindset from managing people to shaping the environment, you move from being a reactive problem-solver to a proactive force multiplier. You stop being a bottleneck to your team’s growth and instead become the catalyst for it. Your impact becomes scalable, your team becomes more autonomous, and you become the leader your organization truly needs.