In this episode of Leading with Engineering Management, Simon Tomes talks with Gary Hawkes about his recent move from a quality engineering leadership role into head of engineering, where he now looks after around 20 engineers across platform, development, and quality engineering teams working in a project matrix. Gary reflects on the culture shock of trading a long, trusted relationship with a former CTO for a new executive peer group he had to win over from scratch, the commercial conversations he first felt out of his depth in, and how he learned to speak up, push back on a more directive management style, and gradually find his confidence across the wider team.
From there the conversation turns to the principles that guide him: finding your own mission, in Gary's case improving outcomes and improving people, caring genuinely for the team rather than treating people as resources, and leading with ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ by seeing the whole organisation as a system.
Gary and Simon explore swapping best practice for context practice, using competing ideas to provoke discussion rather than copy them, and grounding decisions in data through DORA metrics and a maturity model that finally answered where the team was heading. They close on the advantage a quality background brings to engineering leadership, the knack for simplifying complex conversations and asking the one outcome-focused question nobody else thought to, and why more quality people should put themselves forward for these roles.
Chapter timestamps
00:01 Transitioning From QE to Engineering Leadership
01:29 Current Engineering Team Structure
02:42 Navigating Executive Communication and Culture Shock
06:22 Managing Commercial Discussions and New Management Styles
13:16 Core Leadership Principles and Personal Mission
16:02 Prioritising People Over Resources
23:09 Systems Thinking in Organisational Leadership
24:44 Applying Tactical Contextual Practice
28:37 Using Data and Maturity Models
32:54 The Advantage of a Quality Background
Additional resources
- 6 leadership mistakes that made me a better leader
- When Quality Engineering Creates Chaos: Lessons from my Workshop at Leading with Quality 2026
- Let’s mature this conversation
- DORA metrics
- Contextual Practice
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