Exponential Leadership: Foundation #1 — Empathy

Over the past decade and a half, I’ve been involved in technology leadership- both as an individual contributor and in leadership roles. I’ve seen different flavors of leadership, both good and bad, and I’ve seen how effective technology leadership has an incredible multiplying impact. The book Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman, talks about the multiplying effect of good leadership. I will take it a step further in the technology realm: I believe technology leaders can have an exponential impact on their company, and by extension, the world. When technology is implemented well, it can have a big impact on the people and teams that use it. Similarly, technology poorly implemented can act as a headwind to the people who use it.

When you break down technology leadership, it usually boils down to people, process, and tech resulting in some sort of output.

It’s the delivery of well placed output ‘bets’ that result in the outcomes that are truly sought. With good leadership, there is a correlation between the quality of outputs and the quality of outcomes. So, if you’re doing things right, depending on the result of the output, you should be able to iterate, pivot, or abandon the path you’re on.

Technology leadership is leading and managing the integration of people, process, and technology to produce a series of outputs that aim to achieve a desired outcome. Achieving this integration is THE job technology leaders have, and doing it well results in an exponential impact. I call this exponential leadership. What acumen and skills are necessary for this integration? Well, this blog series is going to take a look at the top four areas I see as foundational for exponential leadership. These are:

1. Empathy
2. Fast feedback
3. Respecting cognitive load
4. Humility

Foundation #1 — Empathy

Understand the problem

Understand the customer

Understand your people

I wonder if this is going to come across as cliche, but getting exponential leadership right requires understanding people. It’s becoming more and more the case that the stereotypical nerd who is rude and socially inept has no place in technology delivery. I’m not really sure why this was ever seen as acceptable behavior, but I’m glad to see it going away. Solving people’s problems is why technology exists, whether that’s a match to start a fire or a cloud service to stream video content. Understanding people and their needs is central to technology delivery. It’s always been that way and always will be.

Fundamentally, if you work in technology and you don’t understand who you’re helping, you’re going to struggle. That struggle might look like personal depression or apathy about the work you do. The struggle might look like leaders constantly berating you for missing the mark on things, even though you did what you were asked. Whatever symptoms you experience, delivering technology absent customer understanding will ultimately result in burnout and frustration. This is why working in a smaller company can be so exciting and fun: because there are so few layers between you and the customer you are serving, you can see how the work you do impacts those people personally. Alternatively, if you work in a very large enterprise on a shared service, the work you do can sometimes feel meaningless. You’ve increased the density of services that can run on a node by 5%, saving the company $200,000 a year… so what?

It’s this sort of variance across technology leadership roles that can create hangups in discussing the fundamentals of exponential leadership. It is my belief that these two extremes, small startup vs. large enterprise, have more in common than they do differences. It all comes back to understanding people, what they care about, how they behave, and how to influence and support them.

One of the key components of empathy is understanding the problem you are solving. It’s easy in technology to jump to solutioning. Technology is a solution to a problem. Technologists like tinkering with technology, so it is natural to want to jump straight to solutions. That’s the part where you get to build things! But, alas, spending weeks, months, or even years building a solution that no one wants is an awful feeling. The taste of excitement and exhilaration building something turns to ashes in your mouth upon lukewarm reception of a solution. I know this from personal experience, making cloud services available to an IT department. The base assumption was that ‘if we built it, they would come’. Upon years of foundational work, we realized the solution missed the mark in multiple ways. Because the funding model required significant upfront planning, there wasn’t an opportunity to iterate or quickly correct the mistakes. Ultimately we were focusing on the wrong thing. We were trying to solve a technical problem instead of trying to solve a problem for the people. Technology delivered without a clear problem to be solved is what I now consider the ‘shotgun’ approach towards technology delivery. You might get a hit, and the fact that you’re being funded to do something implies an underlying problem, but without a structured means of understanding the problem you are solving, the team you are leading will devolve into technology fixation: a costly endeavor with dubious outcomes.

Another key component of empathy is understanding the behavior of your customers, the people you are trying to help. Without an understanding of what ‘normal’ is for a customer, it’s very hard to develop a solution for them. For example, how you build a solution for a coal plant foreman will look quite a bit different from the solution you provide a software developer at a tech startup. I don’t care how well you documented that GraphQL service, expecting all the coal plant foremen to read and understand it is a fool’s errand.

While this is an extreme illustration, microcosms of this type of customer misunderstanding occur all the time in technology delivery, and it’s super frustrating. It’s worth noting here that pretty much every sector I’ve seen sucks at this to some extent. Some examples that come to mind:

• The itty bitty screen space I have to work with in Zillow’s rental property management UI (people use laptops, not 32” monitors, when managing their rental properties)
• BMW and Lexus’ terrible ‘one center control thing’ concept to confuse vehicle operators around the world (i’ll stick with my Honda Odyssey :P)
• A small city park right next to a busy road (on the plus side, it’s covid safe since no one goes there… ever)

I’m sure you yourself have been frustrated or confounded recently by a design decision of something you use. It’s a surprisingly common occurrence and it boils down to understanding the way people ACTUALLY interact with things. Too often, problems are abstracted and given to software teams in the form of requirement documents or user stories. While useful to a certain extent, if these software teams never interact with the customer they are solving a problem for, a user story will lack the context necessary to build delightful solutions.

Ensuring you and your team are getting the appropriate exposure to customer problems and the customers themselves is a part of an exponential leader’s foundational skill of empathy. The other part is understanding and supporting your team.

There’s a lot of literature on people leadership and good management, so I won’t spend a great deal of digital ink on the subject. However, in the sphere of technology leadership, it’s especially important to keep your eye on Maslow’s and Herzberg’s models for understanding technology worker motivations.

Quickly summarizing:

• Maslow’s motivational model- People have lower level needs that must be fulfilled before higher order needs matter to them. For example, if a person is worried that they are about to lose their job due to your company recently being acquired, telling them they are doing a great job or giving them a new assignment probably won’t do much for their sense of wellbeing. Once a person has their lower level needs met, they can then begin to focus on personal growth and higher level achievements.
• Herzberg’s two-factor model- When it comes to job satisfaction, some things are seen as ‘must haves’ in order to be happy with your job (referred to as ‘Hygiene factors’). Other things are ‘nice to haves’ that turn work into something that is almost recreational (referred to as ‘Motivator factors’). If you don’t have the hygiene factors in place, your people will be dissatisfied with their work and you’re not going to get much bang for your buck out of motivator factors. BUT, once you’ve reached the ‘good enough’ stage of hygiene factors, you get very little marginal improvement from additional investments. Basically, get your hygiene factors into a ‘good enough’ state, then shift your focus to the motivator factors.

Integrating these two models with leading technology workers can provide some useful insights on developing empathy with your team. For example, since technology workers generally make high wages, it can be easy to dismiss other motivator factors. The idea that you only need to pay what is ‘fair’ to technology workers and to then focus your attention on ensuring their work is meaningful should be a relief to most leaders. I’ll put it another way- you don’t have to compete with Google or Facebook on salary! I’ve heard ‘we aren’t Google’ as a reason for having trouble finding talent at more than one company. While there is definitely a skill shortage in the tech sector, pragmatically as a technology leader, that’s not your problem to solve. You can take very real action today: give your people meaningful work and thank them for it.

You’ll be amazed how much further a handwritten note can go versus a $10k pay raise when it comes to those coveted employee engagement scores.

Another factor in technology leadership is change. There is so much change, that often employees can feel stress and anxiety about the security of their position. As a leader, you can help ‘future proof’ your workforce against these sorts of baser level needs on Maslow’s model. One way that I’ve handled this in my own career is to ensure I’m keeping my eye on where the puck is headed. When I was a VMware admin, I realized that the skillset was consolidating, meaning fewer and fewer jobs. In response, I started growing my skillset in cloud services. This gave me confidence in seasons of change in both my usefulness to my current employer and my ability to find work elsewhere if I lost my job for some reason.

Similarly, I support folks I lead in thinking about and growing their skillsets in this fashion. Supporting people in their professional growth is the best hedge against change. They will trust you more as a result and they will be better prepared for the changes no one saw coming.

Having empathy for what your people are experiencing in their lives and how they experience work at your company is key to building and maintaining trust with your team. Understanding the customers your team is supporting and the problems they are having is foundational to your team building useful and delightful solutions. While many other things are also necessary to be a good technology leader, I’ve come to the conclusion that empathy is a cornerstone for the rest, and a prerequisite for exponential leadership.

Focus on understanding the problem, the customer, and your people. The rest will fall into place, because you’ll now be an advocate for the stakeholders that matter.