I don't understand why any of these except hiring is persuasion. Engineering managers don't pitch projects. They shouldn't be persuading leadership to give them resources, they just lay out timelines for what is possible with now, with more. Maybe even with less.
As an engineer and engineering leader in my career I've never had to persuade or be persuaded to do the tasks I'm assigned. They're the job. Sometimes they're boring. I think about that during planning and make sure people get some variety and ask them what they like working on.
Why would you need to persuade a cross team lead to help you? Are they not doing their job? I've never asked and been told "you have to persuade me" and if I was told that I'd ask leadership for clarification on priorities.
This sounds like organizational dysfunction and fiefdom building.
when you work among 180 thousand other people, a good chunk of you energy will be spent on justifying your existence.
in a top-heavy, cutthroat place like a FAANG, people will fight fiercely for promotions (that's half a mil extra cash in your pocket this year!), and for managers that means getting into the newest hypest shiniest projects or fall behind and eventually get kicked out. The way you join hyped-up projects (or even hear about them before it's too late): you invent one if you have the balls and the energy to pull it off, or persuade someone influential to let you join an existing one. So, strong disagree on "managers don't pitch projects".
For some reason, whether that be scale, or dysfunction, you tend to end up with disparate silos even in relatively well run orgs.
I did a stint with a large US org where my SOW was to do azure (hashicorp) vault. The org already had about 20 aws vault clusters, GCP was a likely new target.
I sold k8s. That was seen as risky despite being less overall work, so I delivered direct on azure clusters, then was given a SOW to do k8s POC ( with a view to doing GCP ).
POC delivered a fairly production like service in ~a week using the most junior person on the team, only to spark outrage that I ( a person with about 10 YOE with k8s ) had delivered a POC without discussing with the core platform team ( which was intended to be POC 2, separating the issues of concern ).
Now I get why people do platform teams, and this platform wasn't bad ( more work than rolling my own equivalent; but the processes in theory ensure the less experienced people don't do terrible things ).
End result was pretty much a blocker on GCP vaults because we were awaiting said platform team to deliver for us, and me ( a contractor that delivered several at risk SOWs ahead of schedule ) cut loose because we're blocked by the other team.
In such an org, it's the job of the EM to advocate for their delivery stream, mine didn't quite manage it that day.
However, this org was probably the best ran at scale I've ever seen ( usually you can nuke an org in like 10 minutes after they give you access to the SCM & CI/CD ).
I think you might reading this strictly. Persuation is always in play. If you don't need to persuade someone actively that just means they are already persuaded in some way. Maybe that way was purely organisational (e.g. part of the normal operations) or it was by some higher up.
As an engineer I agree that an organisation should work as you described. But depending on where you are and what it is you need to do you might need to persuade somebody to do something. Or if the doing is implied you might need to persuade somebody to do something faster (means: they should priorize your thing above other things) or with a higher quality than usual (means: they should use more time, put their best hire to work or whatnot).
I agree that this isn't optimal, but each department may see other things as important. For accounting that audit might seem more important than getting your order done quickly, because for them it is the bigger, scarier and more complicated thing. So persuation sometimes just means reminding people why the thing you're doing is important.
As an engineer and engineering leader in my career I've never had to persuade or be persuaded to do the tasks I'm assigned. They're the job. Sometimes they're boring. I think about that during planning and make sure people get some variety and ask them what they like working on.
Why would you need to persuade a cross team lead to help you? Are they not doing their job? I've never asked and been told "you have to persuade me" and if I was told that I'd ask leadership for clarification on priorities.
This sounds like organizational dysfunction and fiefdom building.