Empathy and Coaching "Set Exceptional Leaders Apart" in 2026—But Engineering Orgs Still Promote Based on Technical Excellence. When Does This Change?

General
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I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes exceptional engineering leaders in 2026, especially after reading some eye-opening research. The data is clear: empathy, mentorship, and coaching are what set leaders apart. Yet when I look at how engineering organizations actually promote people—including my own—we’re still overwhelmingly rewarding technical excellence.

In the last 18 months at my EdTech startup, I’ve promoted three engineers to engineering manager roles. Two are thriving. One is struggling badly, and if I’m honest, it’s because I made the classic mistake: I promoted the best engineer, not the best leader.

The Traditional Path Still Dominates

Here’s the pattern I see everywhere: the engineer who ships the most features, writes the cleanest code, or architects the most elegant systems gets tapped for leadership. The logic seems sound—technical credibility matters, right? But what we’re actually doing is taking our best individual contributors and asking them to do a completely different job.

Modern research shows that “your technical foundation will get you noticed, but your communication, empathy, and conflict resolution skills will set you apart.” More dramatically: technical skill gets you the interview, but soft skills get you the promotion.

So why are we still doing it backwards?

A Tale of Two Promotions

Let me share two promotions from my team:

Engineer A was our star senior engineer. Fastest coder, best architectural instincts, solved the hardest technical problems. When we needed a team lead, everyone assumed it would be them.

Engineer B was solid technically but not exceptional. However, they ran our onboarding program, mentored junior engineers without being asked, and had a gift for explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

I promoted Engineer A. Within six months, two engineers on their team quit. The team’s velocity dropped by 30%. Code reviews became battlegrounds. Engineer A was miserable—they missed coding and felt overwhelmed by “people problems.”

Engineer B? I promoted them to lead a different team six months later. That team now has 94% retention over two years, consistently hits their commitments, and just recruited two senior engineers who specifically cited “the leadership culture” as their reason for joining.

The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong

When we promote technical excellence over leadership capability, we:

  1. Lose our best ICs to management roles they don’t want and aren’t trained for
  2. Create toxic team dynamics through command-and-control technical leadership
  3. Drive away diverse talent who often excel at collaborative, empathetic leadership
  4. Damage our succession pipeline because poor managers don’t develop future leaders

At my previous company (a well-known collaboration platform), we calculated that promoting the wrong engineers into management cost us an average of $400K per bad promotion in turnover, reduced productivity, and time to course-correct.

What Actually Works

The organizations getting this right are doing a few things differently:

1. Dual-track career paths that reward technical expertise without forcing management

2. Explicit leadership assessment before promotion—not just “they’d probably be good at it”

3. Management training before the promotion, not after they’ve already struggled

4. Measuring leadership behaviors like coaching effectiveness, team satisfaction, and cross-functional collaboration

Research on engineering manager skills makes it clear: “While technical expertise is crucial, the hallmark of a great engineering manager lies in their soft skills and their leadership abilities—these skills enable them to effectively manage people, foster innovation, and bridge the gap between business goals and technical execution.”

The Hard Question

Here’s what I keep coming back to: When does this actually change?

Not “should it change”—we all know it should. But when? What forces the shift from promoting technical excellence to promoting leadership excellence?

Is it when enough companies experience the pain of failed promotions? When boards start holding executives accountable for leadership pipeline development? When we have better frameworks for assessing leadership potential before promoting?

Or is it more fundamental—do we need to stop treating engineering management as a “promotion” and start treating it as a lateral career change requiring different skills?

I’m implementing explicit leadership criteria in our promotion documentation this quarter. We’re piloting a “leadership track” program where engineers demonstrate coaching and mentoring capabilities before being considered for management.

But I’m one VP at one company. This feels like an industry-wide conversation we need to have.

What’s your experience? Are you seeing the shift toward empathy and coaching in promotion decisions, or is technical excellence still the primary criterion? And for those who’ve made the transition—what convinced your organization to change?

For those interested in the research:

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This hits hard, @vp_eng_keisha. I’ve lived through this same pattern at the CTO level, and you’re absolutely right—we’re still overwhelmingly promoting technical excellence over leadership capability. But I want to add a layer you touched on briefly: the executive and board pressure that perpetuates this system.

The Technical Credibility Trap

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when I’m in board meetings or exec staff discussions about engineering leadership, the first question is almost always “are they technically credible?” Not “can they build and develop teams,” not “do they have the emotional intelligence to navigate conflict”—it’s “will the engineering team respect their technical chops?”

At the executive level, there’s still this belief that technical credibility is the foundation for everything else. And to be fair, it’s not entirely wrong—you can’t lead engineers if you don’t understand what they’re building. But we’ve overweighted it to the point where it becomes the primary criterion, and people skills become “nice to have.”

A $400K Mistake (I Made the Same One)

Three years ago at my previous company, I promoted our most technically brilliant architect to Director of Engineering. On paper, perfect choice—deep technical expertise, respected by the team, strong architectural vision.

Six months in, we had lost four senior engineers. The director’s direct reports were burned out. Cross-functional relationships with product and design were… let’s call them “strained.” Code reviews turned into architecture debates that killed velocity.

The breaking point? Our head of product came to me and said: “I can’t work with this person. They’re brilliant technically, but they can’t translate technical constraints into product trade-offs, and they treat every disagreement as a technical argument they need to win.”

We course-corrected—moved them to a Principal Engineer role (which they’re thriving in), promoted someone else with stronger people skills. But the damage was done. Cost us probably $500K in turnover and lost productivity, plus 9 months of org chaos.

What Changed at Our Company

After that experience, I pushed for systemic changes:

1. Dual-track career paths — We now have IC leadership roles (Staff/Principal/Distinguished Engineer) that carry the same comp and prestige as management track. Critical for keeping technical talent in IC roles.

2. Explicit leadership assessment before management promotions — We use a 360 review focused specifically on coaching, collaboration, and communication. Technical assessment is separate and secondary.

3. “Management bootcamp” — 6-week program covering 1-on-1s, performance management, conflict resolution, cross-functional collaboration. You complete it before the promotion is finalized.

4. Reversible promotions — If someone tries management and it’s not working (for them or their team), we explicitly create a path back to IC roles without shame or comp loss.

But Here’s the Systemic Challenge

The hardest part? Changing the executive mindset that technical expertise is the primary credential for engineering leadership.

I still get pushback from our CEO and board when I advocate for promoting someone who’s “just” a solid engineer but an exceptional people leader. The questions are always: “But are they technically strong enough?” “Will the senior engineers respect them?”

What I’ve learned to do is reframe the conversation:

  • Instead of “people skills vs technical skills,” I talk about “team performance multiplier”
  • Instead of “soft skills,” I use “organizational capability building”
  • Instead of “empathy,” I talk about “retention and hiring pipeline” (because boards care about metrics)

When Does It Actually Change?

To answer your core question: I think it changes when we change the promotion criteria at the executive level first. VPs and CTOs need to model this shift, be explicit about the leadership behaviors we value, and be willing to have hard conversations with boards and CEOs about what actually predicts success.

It also changes when we treat management as a career pivot, not a promotion. We need to stop calling it “moving up” and start calling it “moving into a different role with different skills.”

Your “leadership track” program sounds exactly right. What metrics are you using to assess coaching and mentoring capabilities? I’m curious how you’re making it concrete enough for promotion committees.

One more thought: This is also an equity issue. Women and people of color often excel at collaborative, empathetic leadership but get overlooked because they’re not the loudest technical voice in the room. Changing promotion criteria isn’t just about effectiveness—it’s about creating pathways for diverse leadership.

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I’m living this tension every single day with my team of 40+ engineers at our financial services company. @vp_eng_keisha, your “Tale of Two Promotions” could have been written about my last two team lead decisions.

The hard part? I intellectually know empathy and coaching are what matter, but the organizational muscle memory still defaults to technical excellence. It’s like we all know the answer, but we keep getting it wrong in practice.

The Cultural Dimension Nobody Talks About

As a Latino engineering leader, I want to add a perspective that doesn’t get discussed enough: different cultures have different models of what leadership looks like.

In my experience growing up in a Mexican-American household and working in Latino engineering communities (I’m active in SHPE), collaborative leadership and mentorship are deeply valued. The best leaders aren’t the ones who know everything—they’re the ones who bring everyone along.

But in many US tech companies, the dominant leadership model is still “the smartest person in the room who wins technical arguments.” That model systematically disadvantages leaders who lead through empathy, consensus-building, and coaching—which often includes people from cultures that value collective success over individual brilliance.

When we promote primarily on technical excellence, we’re not just making a bad leadership choice—we’re reinforcing a particular cultural model of leadership that excludes other valid approaches.

The Framework We’re Using (and Struggling With)

At my company, we’ve implemented a leadership assessment framework for promotions to engineering manager. Here’s what we look for:

Technical Foundation (30% weight)

  • Can you understand and contribute to technical discussions?
  • Do engineers respect your technical judgment?
  • Can you make architectural trade-offs?

People Leadership (50% weight)

  • Do you coach and develop others?
  • Can you give effective feedback?
  • Do you create psychological safety on your team?
  • Can you navigate conflict productively?

Cross-functional Collaboration (20% weight)

  • Can you translate technical constraints to business stakeholders?
  • Do you build strong relationships with product, design, data?
  • Can you influence without authority?

The problem? That 50% “People Leadership” bucket is still subjective and hard to measure. Technical excellence has clear signals—code reviews, architecture docs, incident response. But coaching effectiveness? Team psychological safety? Much harder to quantify.

A Story That Made Me Rethink Everything

Six months ago, I was deciding between two candidates for a team lead role:

Candidate 1: Senior engineer, strongest technical contributor on the team, drove our microservices migration. Always the person we went to for hard technical problems.

Candidate 2: Mid-level engineer, solid but not exceptional technically. But I noticed something: junior engineers always went to them first with questions. They ran our onboarding program. They were the one who organized team retros and made sure quiet voices got heard.

I was 80% ready to promote Candidate 1. Then I asked our junior engineers: “Who would you want as your manager?”

Unanimously, they said Candidate 2. Their reasoning? “Candidate 1 is brilliant but intimidating. Candidate 2 actually cares about our growth and makes time to explain things.”

I promoted Candidate 2. Three months in, that team has the highest engagement scores in our org and just delivered a complex project two weeks ahead of schedule.

But here’s the kicker: when I presented this promotion to our executive team, I spent 20 minutes justifying why their technical skills were “good enough” and only 5 minutes talking about their leadership strengths. The default assumption was still that technical excellence should be the primary criterion.

The Measurability Challenge

@cto_michelle, you asked about metrics for coaching and mentoring. Here’s what we’re experimenting with:

  1. 360 feedback with specific leadership behaviors — not “do you like this person” but “does this person give you actionable feedback,” “do they create space for your ideas,” etc.

  2. Team engagement scores — how does the team rate psychological safety, manager support, growth opportunities?

  3. Mentorship track record — how many engineers have they formally/informally mentored? What do those mentees say about the impact?

  4. Visible leadership behaviors — do they run onboarding, organize learning sessions, facilitate difficult conversations?

But honestly? We’re still figuring it out. The challenge is that “empathy” and “coaching” feel too soft and unmeasurable for promotion committees that want clear rubrics.

When Does It Change?

To your question, @vp_eng_keisha: I think it changes when we make leadership effectiveness visible and measurable in the same way technical excellence is visible and measurable.

Right now, everyone can see a great pull request or a brilliant architectural solution. But great coaching happens in 1-on-1s. Building psychological safety happens in team dynamics over months. Creating inclusive environments happens in small moments of recognizing quiet voices.

We need to surface those behaviors, measure them, and give them the same weight we give technical contributions.

Maybe it also changes when more people like us—VPs, Directors, CTOs from diverse backgrounds—are in the room making promotion decisions and bringing different models of what effective leadership looks like.

What’s your experience with making coaching and empathy concrete enough for promotion committees? How do you measure something like “creates psychological safety” in a way that skeptical executives will accept?