Hi I’m new to managing a team. I inherited two people. I like them both. Both were hired by my predecessor. The junior person is a joy to manage and work with. My manager is a bit more complicated. If I throw something out that she has never done, I don’t get questions or input I get a stone face that I can’t read. It takes a couple of conversations before I realize she never has done X. How can I get her to ask questions when she’s unsure? And yes after conversations I ask any questions or comments? I usually ask (when I get the stone face) does this make sense? I get no feedback so I assume she understands and knows the project at hand. Any suggestions on how to bring out questions when this happens?

I work at a ~30-person software services company, we automated my sales team's "sales admin todo", because it was tiresome enough and fairly trivial to do. I personally worked on the automation, which was bad, because half of the process lived in my head, and the edge cases only showed up once it was running, but I had limited time to check....

So I asked my only junior team member to sit with one of my sales agents doing the work and finalize and adjust things.

Yesterday I figured this has a name: forward deployed engineer, basically someone highly consultative, fairly business-minded who can understand your processes, who is technical enough to see what can be built and communicate why it is good for your usecase. MIT’s 2025 GenAI report even found outside-partnered AI projects succeed about twice as often as internal builds.

Still, somehow I would default to in-house. So I’m curious:

• What would make you bring someone in from outside?
• If you kept it in-house, why?
• Anyone running a hybrid: your own process owner, outside builders, fixed handover?

Disclosure: I'm thinking retraining part of my team to be FDE, but in the same time I would hesitate to hire one... Failure stories welcome.

before i joined my current company, i was working in some modest company with a few people and a young leader, she was 38 and i found her leadership style so modern. we could do a serious meeting on literally a whatsApp call and she seemed to be good at managing people, even during Covid when we moved all work remote, she seemed to be solid and composed and that is the time we completed crucial projects for the company. her leadership style was free style and we did not attend any leadership seminar or workshops. Now i happen to have moved the parent company where now i work under the overall company leader who is 80, i find his style so different. He believes so much in employee training and he himself attends several leadership seminars, talks and trainings which i dont see make any change on how he leads. I am just 26 months old here but i have attended 7 workshops & leadership meetings etc. but still i long for how i was being led in my previous workplace. Does these seminars, workshops etc really change how people lead? makes me think truly leadership is inborn, you cannot fully learn it, its not a skill like driving that you perfect with time or through learning