Pairing in leadership

When I took my first real leadership position I found it quite isolating. Like many engineering leaders, I was given the role because I had been good at building software — but leadership is about people and strategy, not code and architecture — and my nascent leadership skills needed a lot of work.

My former-peers needed management, my boss was too busy to teach me the ropes, and the projects I was responsible for were falling behind. I was expected to run programs of work, manage a budget, motivate a team, handle interpersonal issues, make tactical and strategic decisions that affected the whole company — but I wasn’t given a leadership role because I had done any of that particularly well. I was made an engineering lead because of my skills in ‘coding’ — and so that’s how I decided I needed to continue to help the team. I wrote code, became a bottleneck, ignored bigger challenges, and compounded the problems on the project.

It turns out, you can’t solve every problem with JavaScript.

But what if I didn’t have to work through every day’s challenges on my own? Sure, mentorship helped me, but the guidance was intermittent. Having a good manager with time to spend coaching you can be useful too. And there are a hundred articles and videos out there for every challenging scenario a leader might face. But those aids aren’t there to help all the time, they don’t know what you’re doing day in and day out, and they won’t necessarily have your back when things go wrong.

This is where pairing can help.

What is pairing?

In software engineering, Pair programming is a technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently.

While reviewing, the observer also considers the “strategic” direction of the work, coming up with ideas for improvements and likely future problems to address. This is intended to free the driver to focus all of their attention on the “tactical” aspects of completing the current task, using the observer as a safety net and guide.

The output of pairing in programming is code, but there are similarities in the output you’d want from leaders who are pairing. Code is a series of recorded decisions, business rules, documented compromises and thought out strategies. Much of the work produced in leadership has similar outputs: strategies, policies, proposals, documented learnings, defined processes, risk mitigation plans, metrics, budgets. All can benefit from being produced by pairs.

Pairing in leadership roles at Everest

We tried this approach of Pairing in Leadership at Everest Engineering. We recently re-organised our business units to align with our customers’ business stage (start-up, scale-up or enterprise) and managing each of these crews is a pair of leaders.

We each bring different experiences to the role. We have someone close to us to support and help us in our decisions every day. We have redundancy in our operations. We have companionship.

I am one of the leaders looking after the Start-up projects. Rav is my pair. He’s a Product leader in India and I am an Engineering leader in Australia. Together, we cover all the bases of what might be needed to run product development projects with our clients. Geographically and culturally, I am close to our Australian team members and clients, and he’s close to our Asian team members and clients. We have differing skills and life experiences, but we learn from each other and know enough about what the other is doing to step in whenever we need to — like when Rav was out with Dengue Fever for two weeks, or when I disappeared over the school holidays.

Allira is one of our leadership team members currently returning to work from her recent parental leave. Allira has chosen a staggered return to work, one day per week, slowly increasing to 3 days — normally, that wouldn’t work in a leadership role, however with the pair model, it can because we know our leadership roles will be filled by multiple people. This means we get to keep the valuable skills and insights Allira offers our business, and Allira is supported to choose the way she wants to manage this stage in her life — be it working casually, part time or fulltime.

We’ve seen a lot of opportunities to improve through pairing:

• Our solutions are more robust by factoring in diverse viewpoints.
• People within the pair can play to their strengths. No one is perfect and able to do everything. Acknowledging that allows us to catch each other’s blind sides. This can actually speed you up!
• We have decreased risk and built in contingency by sharing the knowledge of a solution or the reasoning behind a decision.
• The presence of a partner provides a level of accountability, for getting a task done and catching our mistakes.
• We can actively encouraging people with less experience in some areas to contribute and learn alongside someone with more experience.

The improvements we observed

By playing to individual strengths, the performance of the teams we lead has measurably improved in a number of ways. Where a team has had an engineering challenge, the leader more inclined to that work has been quick to identify and respond. The same can be said for a delivery risk, a UX opportunity, or a potential cultural, regional or communication challenge. There is someone within the pair who is likely to have greater expertise in any of these specific scenarios than the other and so risks have been identified sooner and mitigated with greater effectiveness.

The number of projects we can take on has also increased for a similar reason. You may think that output would go down if you have two people doing the same job, but because each person in the pair can focus on what they do best, the time-consuming tasks are naturally prioritised by those who can do them quicker and with fewer mistakes. Before we adopted this model, a leader may be overseeing five projects. Now a pair of leaders can be accountable for twenty between them.

Our clients have also benefited. When they have needed to speak to someone, there is more often a leader available at a time which suits them — and that person has all the context to help with most situations. We’ve extended our availability by 4 hours by starting in the Australian morning and ending in the Indian evening. The clients also know that regardless of the challenges they are facing, we’ll have broader experience at hand to help.

Many of our employees also have the benefit of this diverse leadership for coaching, advice, or just conversation. There’s always someone in the same timezone, a leader close to their professional discipline, who can be available when needed.

We’ve seen that Pairing in Leadership has had a positive effect on our business and our people. We have built-in contingency, more learning opportunities, diversity in our decision making, and collaboration and companionship at the highest level of our organisation.

People often say it’s lonely at the top. Well, we’ve shown it doesn’t have to be.