How to scale your engineering team the modern agile way / Part 2
Insights from a servant leading VP of Engineering — a multi-part series
Welcome back dear reader. In part 1 of this series we looked at how empowering your people will create environments where people will truly feel responsible.
In my opinion and experience only people who feel empowered because they really are can and should be held accountable for the things they are doing, no matter on which level and to what extent.
However, there is one other key ingredient to ensure your tech organization can grow in sensible and meaningful ways and directions — and that is leadership.
2. Leadership
Encourage and establish leadership at all levels
Because empowering people not only means showing them their sphere of impact and how it is they can increase that. Almost definitely there comes a point in time where engineers will ask themselves who is actively pushing or owning certain topics — or who should be doing it for that matter.
Consequently the answer has to be: in theory everyone who is up for the task. As the 4th basic principle of Kanban states: “encourage acts of leadership on all levels” — this means that whenever and wherever you see and recognize that some topic or aspect of your organization needs more attention or attention in the first place, it can as well be you, that is everyone stepping up and in. This principle deliberately does not make a point on the concrete nature of aspects that you can assume leadership of — and that is due to the notion that leadership should not only happen on certain (higher) levels in the organization but basically everywhere.
As mentioned earlier, leadership should not be taken in a traditional sense but rather with a strong tinge of servant leadership, essentially meaning that it’s not necessarily you to actually come up with the solution to everything but ensuring the task or issue at hand has the level of visibility it needs because there is a common understanding of its importance and severity to the business.
Servant leadership means enabling and empowering others to assume leadership over certain aspects of your organization. It strongly leans towards focussing on the human beings, their needs, interests and strengths. Thus you will be able to gather highly motivated and committed people around you without having to create line management positions for them, as it was the case in traditional leadership scenarios.
Let’s work through a few typical examples:
- for instance you keep encountering that certain stakeholders in your company end up in deadlocks where each party is waiting for input from the other.
- people keep misunderstanding one another because the established ways of communication are unclear or ambiguous.
- you’ve repeatedly noticed that new colleagues don’t get onboarded properly in their teams because there is a set of documentation or tutorials missing or workshops of sorts.
- you are being haunted by the impression that those manual testing/build/deployment steps could and should somehow be automated
…well, take the lead by voicing your ideas — and concerns!
And even if you may not have any clue as to how to solve it concretely, still if others agree the issue needs attention, this is the very first step to successfully have a solution implemented some time later. Oh and by the way: taking action and ownership is one essential cornerstone of meaningful career progression; your doings will be seen and remembered, provided your company culture is actively promoting recognition and giving feedback to one another.
Again, should you be a person already in charge of large parts of your business and organization: the earlier you will get used to sharing your influence and power the better for your company. What previously lay in the hands of “the mighty few” is now being distributed more evenly among people who might be as talented as you to lead efforts and even people. People who might even be at some point entitled to do your very job.
And believe me when I say: if you live to see that happening — let’s you’ve moved on and some day learn one of your former mentee got promoted to VP or so — you will know you did the best job possible.
Still it should be noted that taking increased levels or even full responsibility for larger efforts and programs can turn out to be an overwhelming sensation and experience for some. Hence it is essential to keep evaluating your mentee’s own levels of maturity and seniority as best and as often as possible. In order for scaling up your organization in a healthy way without burning out people you need to pay close attention to them, increase the frequency of one-to-ones and provide leadership coaching fitting both your actual context and the audience.
Because what must not happen is that the challenge levels for people new to the leadership game get too high. It is your responsibility to bring your mentees in a state in between what psychology calls Arousal and Control respectively.
This state is often called Flow and numerous studies have shown that people working mainly in their personal flow state will produce better results, progressing better in their professional career than colleagues who are either too anxious or too relaxed in their roles.
How to actually achieve flow state or bring people in theirs is a chapter of its own and various articles out there are here to further support you — one hint from my end: flow state is also sometimes called one’s “happy state” and I figure this is for a reason ;)
Thanks for reading.
This article is part 2 of a multi-part series. Please sit tight as the article is continued. There are even more insights I like to share with you.
I will edit this article and include the according links as they flow in.
