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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.
Engineering management requires that you understand power imbalances, people structures, and consider strategies that are outside one particular project.
People are not pure functions; they have all sorts of interesting side effects.
Values are the fundamental beliefs that guide us, motivate us, and drive our actions. Values describe the qualities we want most to embody. They help us determine what is important, help us understand what we essentially align with.
Values don’t offer something to fix, or an action to take; they provide us context so that we can be more understanding of what is happening and why.
The act of sharing values can also have a side effect of building trust and vulnerability on a team.
Values provide context to a person’s mental state, needs, and motivations.
“All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message.”
core values help companies to determine their goals by creating a stable direction forward.
You express what you value in practice by what you let into your life, what actions you actually take, and how you spend your time.
the teams with the most generative cultures (mission-driven, trusting) were also those with the least outages and highest performance.
Your team needs to see one another with a regular cadence. They need to talk through their work, discuss issues, and hang out a bit.
you’re the responsible and accountable party for setting the team up appropriately for the success of the project,
Saying “we” holds you accountable to your team for leadership decisions that you are a part of, which is how it should be.
Since you’re taking ownership of the decision, you’re also owning that you know about other pieces of the puzzle, and are showing a willingness to dive in with your team.
The culture and morale on your team is a large part of your responsibility.
flow state, moments where you’re so involved in what you’re doing, you feel like every tool you need is at your fingertips, and what you’re making is bigger than you.
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 feedback on your tasks. This does not necessarily have to be human feedback. It can also come in the form of compilation success, tests passing, or PRs (pull requests) going through.
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the more connected you feel to other people in times of stress, the happier you are, and the less stress you report.
In peer and mob programming, team members share their thinking through a problem, as well as wins and mistakes.
Check in with facts. Sometimes we react to an event without checking that we understand exactly what’s going on.
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.
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.
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.
“You can’t call yourself a leader by coming into a situation that is by nature uncertain, ambiguous—and create confusion. You have to create clarity where none exists.” —Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
When a person feels that their work is valued, that they have a North Star purpose both for their personal growth and for wider impact with the people and industry, it’s an incredibly powerful thing.
Building a team where a group of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and lived experiences can thrive is how we create healthy working environments.
The first part of building healthy teams is admitting you won’t know everything, and this may be a time where you need to listen more than you talk.
Stages of Inclusive Leadership Continuum as: Unaware Aware Active Advocate
The culture of your team is only as strong as the worst behavior it tolerates. It’s your job to speak up.
Career ladders alone will not create clarity—as managers, we need to put them into action.
career-ladders.dev
I love it when the qualities you’re working on developing with an employee are those that will serve them anywhere, not just within the company. These should be traits that expand their skill set. These types of tasks typically take some long term work, but it can be very rewarding to work together on because there’s a larger purpose.
In this step, we go through the career laddering doc. I typically have an employee read aloud every list item in their current role to me, then self-assess the progress they’ve made on each item.
The next step is called a 30/60/90. The concept is that your employee breaks down the work they want to be doing in thirty, sixty, and ninety days. I tend to do this with a bit of a twist: We start with ninety days. I ask, “What would you like to accomplish here within the next three months?” Since the career laddering is fresh in their minds, there’s already some guidance on what their focus should include.
I try to set a reminder in our 1:1 doc to revisit the 30/90 plan in about a month. When we check in, we see how each task is coming along, putting little checkmarks next to what’s done.
Try to realign by considering the following: What are their personal goals? What are the company needs? Are we able to address the above two with the work being done? Ask what they think we could do together to make further progress. Restate the expected outcomes and clarify that they can reach those outcomes however they think is best, allowing them to iterate on their tactical plans if necessary.
“People leave managers, not jobs.”
But in the balance of power, the manager can always speak directly to the employee. The inverse isn’t always true.
Even though 1:1s have a tendency to be informal, because everyone already knows each other, they are way more successful when there’s an agenda.
An agenda gives you the context you need to prevent wandering into topics you might not be at liberty to discuss.
Your job is now to align people to the outcomes instead of tactical details of how to get something done. The how is up to them.
convey the same message, but in different ways.
A good leader cannot sit and watch things carry on as usual without sorting out how transformation can occur.
In order to make transformation, the culture has to shift to allow for it.
Be specific about why the changes are made.
Support people to grow the skills they need in order to succeed.
A trap we can easily fall into is talking about the end state and the solutions without talking about the problems we’re trying to solve.
Perception of unfair decision-making. This typically happens when you haven’t done the “seek to understand” step above, or when you don’t talk through the risks when communicating the new vision.
