A Mental Model for Leading High Performance Engineering Teams

This is a series of blog posts on engineering leadership and management where I write about my perspectives on high performance teams, recruiting, tech debt, and other engineering topics. You can read Part II here.

I began coding when I was a teenager and was fortunate enough to discover early on that I had a passion for technology and computer science. During my college years, I began thinking about how I wanted to leverage my interests and passions, and over time grew to the realization that I wanted to work on big and seemingly impossible technical problems that served the greater good. I naturally gravitated towards careers at large companies in their engineering or IT departments to work on these big problems. I’ve also had an opportunity to work with several early stage startups whose stories I felt were compelling.

The experiences I gained, from my first internship at IBM to my current role, exposed me to diverse sets of engineering and IT environments that compressed that experience by a 2:1 factor. For every 1 year I worked, I feel like I gained 2 years of experience. Many of these experiences were high-visibility, high-pressure environments that left you with battle scars if you made it out the other end.

Having been in the trenches and managing and leading teams, being surrounded and mentored by a lot of great leaders, and making a lot of mistakes along the way, I’ve forged my own mental model of engineering management. I’ve decided to share this in the spirit of “open-sourcing” my ideas and soliciting discussion and feedback that I hope will further fortify the model and incorporate multiple perspectives.

The Model

The model helps create an environment and climate for your engineers to do their best work.

There are several components to this. I plan to dive deeper into each component with examples in subsequent posts, but here’s the gist:

1. Objective — define what are you trying to achieve
2. Support and Resources — provide your team access to what they need to accomplish the objective
3. Degrees of Freedom — the level of ownership and autonomy
4. Guardrails — empower your team while ensuring they’re on the right path
5. Risk — navigate the team and avoid perilous situations
6. Noise & Distractions — deflect things that detract focus from your team
7. External Forces & Pressures — deflect and/or absorb pressures that will steer your team off course

Objective

A team works together to accomplish a common goal, and as a leader, you should have a crystal clear picture of the end state you’re trying to reach. Doing so will point and steer your team in the right direction. If your end state is ambiguous and unclear, start asking questions to build enough context and turn a nebulous set of requirements into a well-defined and concrete objective.

To help build context, a good starting point is to ask the following:

1. The What — what do you need to achieve? What’s the value?
2. The Why — why are you working towards The What?
3. The How — how are you going to achieve this?
4. The When — when do you need to achieve this?
5. The Who — who are the players?

(Where is sometimes included. Transposed here with How.)

Once you have context, you need to be able to articulate and paint a picture for your team. If it’s not clear to you, it won’t be clear to them.

Frequently, we’re up against a lot of ambiguity so it’s OK to paint an incomplete picture, but you need to have enough so that the team can start working against it. Your job as a leader is to constantly ensure the team has enough of the picture to stay productive. Over time your end state should come into focus.

Support and Resources

Once you know your objective, you’ll need to equip your team with the right tools, resources, and moral support to set them up for success. Asking your team to accomplish objectives without enabling them to do so is like asking soldiers to go into battle without the appropriate firepower — the chances of success are minimal.

Support can be intangible — coaching, feedback, encouragement, praise, being present, listening, trusting your team, providing opportunities, advocating for them — or they can be tangible — tools, trainings, conferences, compensation, promotions, etc.

Guardrails

You trust your team and empower them to make the right decisions and do the right things. This doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want.

Guardrails protect your team from going off in one direction or the other and being unproductive. If you see a particular team member going in a direction that won’t help you meet your objective, preempt it and point them in the right direction again. In order to do this, you need to be able to have difficult conversations and provide constructive feedback.

In the model, notice that guardrails also insulate your team from noise, distractions, and external pressures — which will be touched upon later.

Degrees of Freedom

The box that is formed once you’ve set your objective, established guardrails, and provided the requisite support and resources is your team’s degree of freedom.

In other words, this is the amount of autonomy they have. They can move up, down, and laterally without being constrained.

Some people might interpret this box as limiting — no one likes being boxed in. That’s not the intention. It’s more about creating a safe space for your team to be productive, and to protect them from outside distractions and pressures and to navigate them in light of risk. It’s more about insulating the team and allowing them to focus. Team members should never feel like they’re boxed in.

Risk

There is some amount of risk in everything you do. As a manager, your job is to assess the risk and its impact, develop options, evaluate the tradeoffs, mitigate the risk, and then navigate the team in light of them.

It’s important to always stay calm under pressure if you’re up against a difficult situation. Panic never helps. A sense of urgency is OK, but stress tends to be contagious and if you’re visibly stressed, your team will feel it. Stay laser focused.

Noise and Distractions

Your team is barraged with distractions that inhibit their productivity. Learn to filter the signal from the noise and shield your team from what’s irrelevant. Keep them out of needless meetings, email threads, and conversations. By doing so, you’re building an environment for your team to focus.

Signal includes anything that helps you reach objectives. Everything else is noise.

External Pressures

Pressures can take two forms — push and pull.

The traditional definition of pressure we feel is workload pressure. What volume of work are we taking on? Too little pressure, your team gets bored. Too much pressure, you begin to overwork and strain your team. Try to regulate and throttle the amount of load on each of the team members so they can remain productive.

As a manager, you’re the point-of-contact for your team and will get asked to do things from N different people. Sometimes, another manager may reach out to your directs for time, pulling the engineer and their focus away. This is an example of a pull. Helping others is encouraged, but if supporting others begins derailing your team from your own objectives, it’s time to pull this person back in.

In either case, you need to run interference for your team.

If you’re doing your job well, your team won’t know about the external pressures, risk, and noise because you’ve insulated them and created an environment where they can focus and do their best work. Exposure to some pressure and risk is acceptable, and even healthy as it creates a sense of urgency and provides context, but you need to absorb the majority of it and not completely pass it on to your team.

Note there is nothing about being directive or authoritative, telling people what to do, and trying to retain control over every aspect of your team. That doesn’t scale, and it’s quite stressful. It’s about enablement and empowerment.

In subsequent posts, I’ll dive deeper into each of these components, provide concrete examples, and talk about some attributes of a high performing team (you need one to lead one, after all)

Note: I use the terms manager and leader interchangeably above. I believe a great leader is a great manager, but a good manager is not necessarily a good leader. A great manager is probably a great leader.

What do you think? Do you think this model is a general and applies to other disciplines? Would love to hear your feedback.

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