- Enable and empower your engineers
- Be an unblocker. Do not judge engineers reaching out to you. Just unblock.
- Promote your engineers aggressively. Market their work around the company. Let them feel like their work is important enough for you to take time to market around. Give them actual promotions when it's due
Don't do the following
- Stealing credit
- Pushing people issues back onto your engineers just because you are scared if talking to others
- Impede their work by micromanaging their execution (stop blocking PRs on bullshit nits, stop blocking docs on formatting. None of this is consequential to the actual project)
- Do not bullshit and lie about promotions
- Do not insert yourself into every step. Let engineers take charge and also suffer the consequences of their decisions
- Practice what you preach. If you ask everyone on the team to write a doc for their projects, you need to do it for your own. If not, your hypocrisy is visible easily and you will lose respect.
Lastly, remove the boss attitude. You are working with people who are perhaps more skilled than you. Work with mutual respect, not with supervisory dictatorship.