Being a Leader — Part 1

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with some great engineers with a plethora of experience in multiple environments. I owe my growth as a leader and an engineer to them and owe them for their guidance, advice, feedback and support. I wanted to share some of my learning as a leader over the years, in part to engage with leaders who engage with this post but also as a tribute to all the awesome teams I have had the opportunity to work with.

As I prepared for this topic, I started to realise I would need to split this into 2 parts. Being only the second post, I am still figuring out the appropriate read times for subjects like these :)

Without further adieu, presenting part 1!

The titles are NOT the job.

There are two types of promotions you will largely see in your career. There is a branch of roles that aligns with being an individual contributor and another that aligns with being a leader of contributors.

• As an individual contributor, my promotions impacted my pride in a big way. These are the younger years. You are fresh out of college and you are starting to make an impact at work. Pride is healthy and builds up your self-worth. It helps us develop respect for ourselves and confidence in our ability to succeed in life.
• In my later years, as I started to lead contributors, I started to see an impact on my ego as well. A sense that I needed to be respected by others for my title and seek external validation, essentially bringing with it a sense of entitlement. Luckily, I had a great mentor who taught me what they called — Ego Metering. It was a way to keep a mental eye when the ego needle started to creep into the red section of the meter, perhaps even before. This needs to be a conscious effort from your end every day and not just at your workplace.
• I loved the Ego Meter and I decided to create another for myself — The Skill Metering. The extreme left is what is called — Talent Dysmorphia. If you are watching Ted Lasso, you will get the reference. I have to admit for a long time I couldn't find the word for the extreme left of my skill meter. An example of this — “I modified 2 lines of code on GitHub, and now I am a skilled developer.”
• The name of the extreme right of the Ego Meter — Imposter Syndrome/Achievement Dysmorphia — The feeling that you are a ‘phony’ despite external evidence of the contrary. Example — “Successfully deploying a terraform IaC template on AWS, but underplaying the value it created with words like — I am only a junior developer/tester.”
• So, what’s the job? It’s your team. Their morale, their aspirations, their expectations and more.

As a leader, you can be anywhere on this meter. Use examples from your day-to-day to see where you sit. But the key is to understand the root of your belief — Is this opinion or thought of mine based on pride or ego?

Personally, the traits that have helped me most to manage my ego are Humility, my willingness to introspect and my commitment to learning.

“It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.”

― Niccolò Machiavelli

Listening is an art.

This one is hard but is worth learning and developing. How good of a listener you will become depends on your team, what they expect from you and how they operate.

Below are tips that I can share that have helped me over the years —

• Summarise everything your team member is saying. This ensures both of you understand what has been said.
• If you struggle with concentration, it helps to scribe what is being said first and then summarise. This helps a lot when the team requires you to address key issues.
• Count to 10 before you decide to respond to what is being said and ask yourself if this can wait until later. Over time, increase the count to 20 or higher. Trust me, your listening will start to see improvements.
• Focus on key terms when listening. Examples are — Tech Debt, Salary, Incidents, Health Issues and Interpersonal Conflict. I call these anchors and it allows me to organise my thinking and notes effectively.
• Use one tool to take notes and stay consistent with it. Don’t swap around as you will lose context on the overall story your team has told you. You don't want to be tracing through your notes when there is a crisis to avert.

Note — I will do another post on tackling 1:1s soon and using note-taking tools to your advantage. PS I love Notion and OneNote.

I have used this article — https://hbr.org/2022/05/whats-your-listening-style as a guide to developing my skills as a listener. (Tip — Invest in the HBR guidebooks collection. It's worth it!)

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

― Stephen R. Covey

Information and Decision Making

I covered in the above section the concept of anchors when taking notes during conversations with your team. However, I wanted to elaborate on the process of information gathering you must focus on as a leader.

• Inform yourself (about systems, processes and people)— Knowledge is power.
• Recognise your organisation's needs and expectations
• Recognise your team’s needs and expectations
• Understand areas of ambiguity. — Ask questions/workshop to clarify.
• Understand your limitations and operating boundaries.
• Regardless of the decision, stick with it. — Decision and direction setting are the hardest part of being a leader. Remember that a good decision will reinforce your ability to do so in the future and bad ones will teach you to course correct in the future.
• Respect Confidentiality. Understand your organisation’s or IT functions information rights management (IRM) policies.
• Be an expert on HR/org policy. (Key aspects of all policies must be at your fingertips.)
• Finally, you won't have all the answers all the time. Use your experience, and intuition and emulate your mentors to work your way towards outcomes.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This brings us to the end of part 1. Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you are a team lead and have your own experiences to share, I would love to hear from you.

Happy Days!

I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and work. For me, it is the Wurundjeri Willum people and I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.

I am a Melbourne-based Engineering Manager with a specialisation in Quality and Platforms Engineering. I am a volunteer Firefighter with CFA and dog father to a 3-year-old Cavapoo.