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December 7 - December 11, 2022
Management is still related to the code, though. Unless our teams are set up well, have support, and have clear strategy, all the coding best practices and linters in the world won’t amount to real outcomes. Management impacts so much of software engineering, so it’s worth taking the time to learn and share. We owe our teams thoughtful leadership.
Leadership is challenging: where your work used to be about you and what value you brought to a team, your work is now about enabling everyone around you.
Now your job affects people’s daily lives in a tangible way that you see reflected back on the faces in front of you.
Working with teams made more sense to me when I started to learn about values. People are not pure functions; they have all sorts of interesting side effects.
Values work is a tool: it gives us some rubric to understanding where a person might be coming from. Working to understand values isn’t a silver bullet to solving every problem, but it affords us a deeper sense of where to start when building understanding and trust within a group. Unpacking a person’s values with them can also help us understand what drives and motivates them. And, the core of working well together is mutual understanding.
Movies sometimes present problems of conflict in a dangerously simplified way: It’s the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Unfortunately, folks can sometimes use that framing when conflicts arise at work, though it’s rarely the case. More often, conflicts are the result of a misalignment of values, and neither person is attempting malice against the other.
We’ve talked a bit about the values of the folks that surround us, but we should also consider our own values, because they do impact our leadership style. The way you lead a team doesn’t need to be the same as other leaders. It can be tempting to “use someone else’s map,” but ultimately we are each individuals, and we have our own lived experiences, values, and boundaries. It’s important to pay attention to these and communicate them to others.
Communicating our own values also gives our employees a bit of context about our working style and needs, which they’ll need in order to best understand us.
Unpacking our own values allows us to notice patterns in our life where we felt very aligned, and to see patterns where things didn’t feel right. That “not feeling right” feeling can be a good indicator of things we need to address. Values misalignment can impact our morale long-term and even lead to burnout if not addressed for a long time.
If you find someone interesting or, conversely, you don’t like how someone communicates, perhaps consider how that is related to what you value? You may start to notice the interplay between your values and your leadership style. Do you value humor and learning?
Understanding the correlation between your values and what you care about as a leader—what you will and will not stand for—can be a great exercise to understand your own motivations, needs, and boundaries. This can help you manage your time as well,
“At Rackspace, one of our values was ‘fanatical support in all we do.’ It was an interesting value because a lot of companies care about their customers, but the word ‘fanatical’ drew a line in the sand of this being extremely important. People in meetings could say to one another, ‘Yes, but is that fanatical? It was a good way of checking that we were actually living up to our values.”
Working on a team with values that largely align with your own is nice, because you can really dig into the makeup of the culture on your team. Clarity is what we’re aiming for here. Clarity is key.
Trust takes time. No way around it, trust is the thing you will want most to build with a team. But trust evolves slowly, takes care and attention, and is easy to lose. Trust is delicate and valuable and should be treated that way.
The people around me: A good manager is not just watching their team and shutting out everyone else. A good manager looks at the wider ecosystem: their team, yes, but also their peers, their peers’ teams, the managers above them, the whole company ecosystem.
Together: One of the interesting challenges about the role of manager is that as you’re looking out for these individuals, as well as the larger company, team dynamics come into play. There is a bit of macro and micro work that intermingles, and it can be challenging to juggle both.
Creativity: Lack of trust is stifling. It’s impossible to be innovative when you feel like every movement is judged. Trust and happiness actually support and develop creativity. It’s good for business. More on this in a moment.
Making our jobs more enjoyable: A working environment where we can be ourselves, make jokes, and be within a trusted group can help us feel included. It’s hard to stay at a job without that trust; and likewise, you can retain employees by providing it.
You may notice that I say this again and again: you as a leader have to go first. You have to show you can be trusted, and you have to be trusting. This means being okay with being vulnerable with your team. It means explaining to them how and why you care about their well-being, in words and in actions.
Some folks think that management looks like a steel fortress of preparedness and authority. I’m not so sure about that.
You’re the manager, so if someone is going to show vulnerability first, it’s easiest on team dynamics if it’s you. You can do this by admitting you’re having a bad day, that you don’t understand something, or that you made a mistake.
It can be scary to go deep with someone soon after meeting them, but this study shows that small talk feels very ephemeral to people, while diving in and getting to more substantive conversations with folks, even if you don’t know them closely, can build important trust and feel better for both parties. Going deep about something very personal can also make a person uncomfortable, so be careful to build this depth over time.
Think about a Venn diagram where one circle represents what the person is interested in, and another represents those tasks the company needs them to do. Are the majority of their tasks in the center of that Venn diagram? If not, can you help guide them there?
How do you build trust, not just between you and each individual, but between team members? One way is to note how members may be avoiding building trust, even if it’s not immediately obvious. In order to evaluate that, let’s look at some qualities that a trusting team has: They feel comfortable raising issues directly with each other. They share personal details with each other, and admit when they are having a bad day—to other team members, this is no big deal. They can debate with one another to find good outcomes. They are flexible with one another’s needs.
In order to be healthy, the team needs to build the muscle of communicating with each other more directly and diving into productive debate instead of dealing with things behind closed doors, or not dealing with them at all.
When I consider good managers whose teams deliver well, I have noticed some similarities. I’ve also noticed some similarities in those managers at the other end of the spectrum, whose teams do not deliver well. It starts with how the managers communicate about their teams. The way that we refer to our teams sends signals: to stakeholders, to your peers, to the team itself, and even to ourselves.
The way you talk about your team and the work you’re doing can build trust or break it. Owning your mistakes as the leader accountable can take vulnerability. Being mindful about how you communicate about your team is one way we can put trust and vulnerability to work in practice.
Lencioni writes about organizational health (not “being smart”) as the biggest key to success. Plenty of smart people with good ideas build companies and see them fail. Organizational health lies in being able to work together.
Fundamentally, all groups within a company are part of one whole. The leadership team is also a team, and should also be treated as your team. How you speak about this team is equally important.
Within a leadership team, there should be trust and vulnerability to own their part so that the whole organization can operate at its best.
So when you talk about that team, presenting them as “we” is important as well. Why? Because as a manager, our job is to try as much as we can to drive balance and clarity.
Saying “we” holds you accountable to your team for leadership decisions that you are a part of, which is how it should be. If people on your team have issues with the direction in which the leadership team is headed, it’s also your responsibility to own that conversation and next steps, as a liaison to the leadership team.
The culture and morale on your team is a large part of your responsibility.
flow state is the phenomenon in which a person is fully immersed in an activity that leads to focus, energized involvement, and enjoyment. A person in flow state is no longer thinking of multiple things, or even their sense of self, but is singularly focused on a task or challenge. Many people report it is the happiest feeling in their lives.
As managers, we can’t actually create flow state. That’s up to the individual. But we as managers should create an environment where flow state can exist as much as possible. A few conditions need to be met for your engineers to get into flow state in their work: You are aligned on the base premises of the work. Your work is challenging, but not impossible. You feel a sense of togetherness with your team and peers, that you’re all building something together and have each other’s backs. Your moral values are not at odds with the work at hand. You feel respected. You get fair and timely
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If we can cultivate environments where people can achieve flow state with little distractions, so much of our work can be removed of unnecessary friction. A person who can be in flow state is also capable of seeing perspectives other than their own.
Intrinsic rewards come when you do something for the sake of doing it, and extrinsic rewards come when you complete a task to get outside validation.
A person will struggle to reach flow state if they are not compensated fairly. Otherwise they will be consumed with the inequity, and it will be challenging for them to focus on the task. I’ve seen this time and time again. Part of our duty as managers is to strive to ensure that our staff are compensated fairly for their work. This can at times mean working with the company’s people (Human Resources) team, or with other stakeholders to understand the process for raises or promotions.
Positive social interactions raise oxytocin, which lowers anxiety. Social support has even been shown to extend one’s lifespan.
As a manager, you can never guarantee an outcome with people, but you can make sure you’re doing what you can to give your team an environment where they feel safe and intrinsically motivated about their work, with little distraction.
Check in with facts. Sometimes we react to an event without checking that we understand exactly what’s going on. Sometimes our brain protects us by leading us to a negative outcome so that we might prepare for it. This is very unhelpful when trying to get a team on the same page, because some members may feel misrepresented or attacked. My coach, Jessi, often reminds me of this as a tool. It can be so helpful to revisit the literal facts involved in a given circumstance.
Find and rally around the positive. Since your brain is actively pulling you and others into fear mode, looking for the positive elements of a situation and saying them out loud can help balance what’s naturally imbalanced. Neurobiologists find that because of our brain’s mirror neurons, even introducing one positive person to a group can raise the overall happiness of the team. When hiring, keep in mind that not everyone you hire has to be positive all the time, but it’s nice to have at least one person on the team to balance things, especially if others tend toward the negative.
Reject negative premises. As a manager, you will sometimes have to counter paranoid or negative views on a situation.
Review consequences. Most of the time, the consequences of an action are not as dire as people make them out to be. Announcing that “Everyone will be fired!” or “The system will implode!” is not very productive. What are the real risks? State them clearly, or let someone else voice them, so that everyone is on the same page about what’s at stake. Then you can sort out what the biggest risks are and what aren’t really risks at all.
In dire situations, step away. If you have extremely volatile people on your team who are stuck in a bad loop, you may have to reconvene at a later time, and meet with them 1:1 to get on the same page. Conversations should remain as open as they can be, but there can be times where meeting as a group is no longer productive, and everyone needs time away to cool off. Use this tool infrequently and not as a default practice, but use in situations where things feel especially off track.
The first time you wrote an async/await function or some other task fundamental to your job, it probably took a lot of cognitive awareness and trial and error. Over time, it became more natural. The more we can break things down into incremental habits for our employees, the higher the chance that they can get into “flow,” and the better chance they have of truly enjoying their work and moving past small goalposts to get to further and further destinations.
“Who cares? While a larger hippocampus may not seem exciting to you, it forced scientists to confront the ‘myth’ of neuroplasticity, that brain change is possible depending on how you live your life. . . . The answer is obvious and inescapable. Brain change, once thought impossible, is now a well-known fact, one that is supported by some of the most rigorous and cutting-edge research in neuroscience.”
Your team can grow to address challenges, they are not fixed. As their manager, it’s important to remind yourself of this when the going gets tough. Believe in your team. As you set higher goals, let them know that you believe they are more than capable of accomplishing them.
Try to think through what skills someone needs to succeed without you. Teach those skills incrementally. Sure, this advice is easy to say, but it’s really hard to do when you’re in the thick of things. Spend some time thinking through ways you can inject that teaching into everyday work and interactions. Try to work on aligning people instead to the outcomes you are looking for from them. You don’t have to code it all yourself, you need to articulate why the code is necessary, and what it will need to do in order to accomplish this. Trust in them to figure out the hows and consult when they
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We may be further down a path at different times in life, or on different dimensions of inclusivity. Perhaps you affiliate yourself with one group, so you find it easier to advocate in that area than in others. However, we can’t stop there- ideally you are always working toward making your unconscious biases known to yourself, and eventually moving groups of people away from prejudiced behavior, not just for your group. You are a leader. It is your responsibility to work toward and demonstrate an inclusive culture. You cannot passively watch and hope it emerges.
