What is an Engineering Manager?

This article describes the various types of Engineering Managers pretty well
https://www.patkua.com/blog/5-engineering-manager-archetypes/

Team Building Exercises

Apart from the normal happy hour once in a while, one of the ways to keep up engagement with the team

Every Monday or in the weekly team meeting, have each member bring 1 picture from their time spent over the weekend. Just something to share what they did over the weekend. If the teams are up for it, we can even vote on best picture of the week and have some kind of award

Risks & your Career

There was a quote I once read that resonated with me

"If you are not willing to put your job at risk for what you believe in, you probably don't deserve the job in the first place"

Cant remember the specific wording or who said it but it goes something like this

I believe the gist of it is that taking educated, calculated well informed risks are worth it in your career.
Even if you fail, at least you come out of it knowing and learning what went wrong

Now I don't recommend just taking risks all the time and for no reason, but playing-it-safe is an old-school methodology that may not apply at times especially in a fast paced industry like Software Engineering

Cheatsheet on Engineering Management

Came across a good handbook on Engineering Management.

I wish I had this when I was transitioning.
https://github.com/raylene/eng-handbook

Here's an excerpt. Kudos to the author