Last quarter I helped a few engineering managers run a short, anonymous survey: what do you want from your lead that you're not getting? About thirty junior and mid-level engineers answered. The patterns surprised the managers.
What didn't surprise anyone
More feedback. More clarity on what "good" looks like at their level. More technical context on why we're building what we're building.
What did surprise the managers
1. They wanted their lead to write more code, not less. Not because they thought their lead needed to ship features — they wanted to see how their lead approached a hard problem in the same codebase, in the same week. Pull requests as pedagogy.
2. They wanted protected time, not protected meetings. The most common complaint wasn't "too many meetings." It was "too many short context-switches in a row." One engineer described it as "my calendar looks fine on paper and feels like a stress test."
3. They wanted disagreement, but with the manager naming what's at stake. "You can push back on me — just tell me whether this is a hill or a preference." That phrasing came up four separate times.
4. They wanted to be the second person to break the thing, not the first. Pair with me, watch me make a mistake, then I'll make the next one.
If you're a manager reading this and any of these feel novel, they're free to act on. Just ask your team directly. You'll get a better answer than this article.