Engineering Managers Influence Limiting Beliefs

Inspire. Expose Obstacles.

Today’s issue of Crafting Tech Teams is for Engineering Managers responsible for inspiring an unmotivated team. Had a few bad projects? Financials didn’t go as planned? Tech Debt causing frustration and Churn? Those are all healthy problems.

Unfortunately, many managers focus on the features and tech, rather than the people producing them. There are some useful tips for you below.

Today’s topics are:

1. Establish one-on-one Communication Channels. You are the lifeline for your team members. You have the biggest impact and influence on their careers at this company. Make it count.

2. Defer Commitment. Before meetings go out of control on little details, decide for every point of discussion when that decision has to be made.

3. Create Transparency on the Team’s Future. Software teams are notorious for their high levels of uncertainty and instability. The chaos and fast pace of startups especially.

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Establish one-on-one Communication Channels

You are the lifeline for your team members. You have the biggest impact and influence on their careers at this company. Make it count.

This topic is perhaps one of the oldest that goes to Day 1 of my coaching practice. This is what I summarised back then in what I called the “Improving communication culture series”. It focuses on Engineering Managers’ and Tech Lead’s ability to nurture relationships with their direct reports on a high-stakes project, short-term.

Direct Reports
Improving communication culture series

1. Call a meeting to align responsibilities

2. Set expectations and agree on reporter/owner

3. Detach from the Project

4. Owner reports to you, set up regular processes

Caveats:

• Main priority is nurturing communication and the human-to-human relationships

• Make sure your presence on the project is appropriate

• Do not settle for Group Accountability

For longevity, you will also need long-term communication. That’s what the one-on-one’s are for. These meetings are not about project status updates. Instead, they focus on:

• Limiting Beliefs

• Obstacles

• Non-technical skill improvement, coaching

• Career advice

• Overall, Human-level Performance reviews

Notably, the one-on-one’s are your primary tool as a manger to check the temperature in the team. Are they stressed? Are there recurring issues? Is someone struggling? Are there cultural biases? Is there wrongdoing?

The second benefit is being able to give negative feedback early and create an improvement or remedy plan for anyone on your team. This way if things ever go haywire and you let someone go, they had ample opportunity to prepare for it.

Your team members should never be surprised about being let go.

Defer Commitment

Before meetings go out of control on little details, decide for every point of discussion when that decision has to be made.

If the decision has to be made now, check if it is reversible. If it is, delegate immediately instead of having meetings on it. It’s a huge waste of time to crowd-source reversible decisions. Pairing and asynchronous reviews are a much better form of collaboration.

Jeff Bezos is known for his laser-sharp methodology. His decision making and empowered high-stakes management runs one of the largest tech operations in the world with AWS and Amazon.

Here’s what he had to say about AWS’s innovation and management. Below is a quote from the 2016 letter to shareholders:

One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.

Most tactical decisions fit into the Type 2 category. They serve to unblock your team. These decisions can be undone easily or acted upon when they turn sour.

The dreaded slowdown happens when an organisation grows and Type 1 decision-making is applied to Type 2 problems. I’ll say that again:

Applying Type 1 decision-making to Type 2 problems causes slowdown.

The slowdown happens because your organisation starts treating reversible, benign decision as irreversible ones. They throw the kitchen sink at it and flood the team with meetings upon meetings.

The amount of time invested also causes another downstream problem: Sunk cost fallacy. Because so many people invested so much time discussing the solutions, everyone is now fidgeting on undoing such a costly course. Worse even if the discussions became heated and caused personal attachment to the outcome.

I spoke on attachment to decisions and code on the Tech Excellence meetup:

Create Transparency on the Team’s Future

Software teams are notorious for their high levels of uncertainty and instability. The chaos and fast pace of startups especially. A clear vision and ability to impact the long-term roadmap is key to a productive team. Understanding the business value of the engineering team’s deliverables allows them to make educated decisions about architecture decisions and maintenance consequences.

Focusing only on the short-term without a clear idea forward is an easy way to produce huge amount of technical debt. Unmanaged technical debt is the major predictor to low developer happiness, which causes a significant drop in productivity—all other things being equal!

Adrian Stanek wrote an excellent piece and commentary for the keynote event below (video link):

The point is that we often need to remember who is implementing, maintaining, and enhancing technology. It's the teams, the people, the humans. And yet, most problems that I was experiencing in tech-driven companies were based on a below-average culture, sometimes even toxic ones.

Dear CTOs, Engineering-Leads, and Seniors, why is the cultural aspect often only 2nd class citizens?

The Key-Note "How To Develop A Cloud-Native Culture" tells the stories of companies starting their evolutionary journey and struggling. I will highlight how the Culture-First approach made a difference, led traditionalists and start-ups to the summit, and became successful modern tech companies.

There is second aspect to this. Clarity might be there—but everyone is moving towards a different, very-clear future. Alignment meetings monthly or bi-monthly help alleviate this divergence and keeps the team motivated and accountable.