Storytelling for your DevEx and Company Culture
How to succeed without mandates
Leadership and Marketing
From junior to principal, no one likes being told what to do. Your team will be most proficient with their own authority if they are empowered to make their own decisions — and their own mistakes.
Take for instance my LinkedIn posts. I’ve been posting every day except Sundays for the past 6 months. I got quite a streak going.
Have you ever laid out an architecture decision record or wiki page outlining a new initiative…
Only to get it ignored?
.
.
.
My first posts got blatantly ignored too.
Nowadays my posts get 10000 views, a discussion every now and then and half a dozen reposts.
But it’s not magic. It’s 6 months of learning.
Was it because my audience hated me?
Hell no!
Though it’s easy to think that.
Is it because they didn’t understand my point?
Hell no!
It’s because I didn’t understand my audience.
It’s because I didn’t decide who my audience are.
To get your tech department moving, you have to inspire them. To get them inspired you first need to understand what inspires them. In absence of inspiration you’ll have to draw upon a lat of discipline.
Discipline is draining. Discipline is taxing.
Discipline without inspiration fails all the time every time.
However, discipline combined with inspiration is very rewarding. You have to market to your team. That learning experience may take 6 months. Maybe more. But it starts with that clumsy attempt and getting ignored. Imagine where you’ll be in 6 months?
Storytelling
For contrast, 6 months later.
It isn’t really about the likes. What I’m aiming for is discussions. Reposts. People reaching out and replying to my newsletter for further clarification. That’s where the most personalised learning happens!
And we come full circle: that’s exactly what a good initiative looks like.
It’s personalised.
An initiative that serves the team’s unique makeup and problems. A plan that shows full understanding of their situation and particular personalities. Perhaps it’s about testing. Perhaps it’s a about flow. A combination of these things — wellbeing.
P.S. Have you checked out the SPACE framework?
Thank you note
I want to thank my audience, and especially you— dear reader. This has been the first month of Crafting Tech Teams and we grew in style!
This newsletter is the culmination of my opinionated insights into the tech industry. There’s some boring tidbits. But most importantly I experience many unique situations with tech teams through my coaching.
Experience that can be educational and cannot easily be shared without context— and without some entertaining storytelling.
And all of this is free (if you choose!). And we’re still not sponsored, can you believe it?