CTO Learning — March 2022
Hello and welcome to our blog here at HyperTrends Global Inc. we are a SaaS Development powerhouse based out of San Diego, CA and are on a mission to help Entrepreneurs and Businesses scale massively by using Software as their primary differentiator.
I am also a part of 7CTOs and have stressed on the importance of growing as a leader in earlier posts.
If you’re not already a part of 7CTOs, please reach out to my friend Etienne. You’ll love what we’re cooking here.
Redundancy & Mentorship Model
March was a very interesting month for us. At HyperTrends, we ran into some challenges with one of the products we were building for a client.
A few key developers started cutting corners, and before we knew it, things went out of control.
The project was delayed, and certain quality metrics we had internally established (like a 400ms page load time) — started falling apart.
Personally, I felt like I had let our client down, so I doubled down and helped bring the project back in alignment.
This turned my schedule upside down, and personally impacted me in multiple areas.
This experience led us to a very important discussion on creating redundancy and peer-mentoring for all employees.
Now, all our employees have always had KPIs they are measured on.
We have created weekly activities that help them accomplish their KPIs. Here are some of them:
- Peer Code Reviews
- Weekly Learning
- Refactoring Code/Cutting-down technical debt
- Cross-Training
It appears that some of them started taking these activities lightly and soon the power of “Compound Effect” took over and impacted their KPIs and the overall teams negatively.
OUR NEW MODEL
Every employee now has a mentor (a more senior level developer) that will be responsible for their growth.
The mentor will also be responsible in ensuring that the employee works on the activities that help them accomplish their KPIs.
The mentor will perform daily checks to ensure that we are still on track and bubble things up to management if things start falling between the cracks.
New employees will undergo a rigorous 3 month on-boarding before they work on production level code.
Senior employees will have new KPIs associated with growth and mentorship.
The Power Of Executive Needs
In our 7CTOs forum, we discussed the importance of Executive Needs.
The theory is simple: “We all have needs. As humans, we have to start identifying our needs. We have to make sure our needs are met. Unmet needs result in poor performance and ultimately, unhappy lives.”
We ALL have needs.
When we were kids, we made our needs known.
When we wanted food, we would ask for it. When we needed a diaper change, we would scream for it.
As time went by, we stopped addressing our needs. Unmet needs can have a negative impact on humans. As leaders, it can impact the overall organization.
Our jobs are challenging. We are responsible for making sure that others NEEDS are met.
For e.g., Employees need to get paid well, they need psychological safety, they need clear instructions, they need TIME, they need to know they are cared for. The list goes on and on…
But not many people ask the C-suite about our needs. That’s where a support forum like ours is so valuable. This is one place where we can openly discuss our needs and come up with strategies to discuss them with our C-suite.
Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a wonderful tool to identify our needs.
We took the time to reflect on our needs. We spoke about how some of these needs are going unmet.
We spoke about how we could talk about our needs with peers and C-suite.
We prioritized our needs into MUST-HAVEs and NICE-TO-HAVEs.
We discussed ways to keep these at top-of-mind when we are in meetings or when we are making commitments.
Empathy plays a big role in understanding and addressing needs.
Conclusion
4-hrs of our forum time went by very quickly. I learned that a lot of my needs were “undiscovered” until I really sat down and had this conversation. I hope this article helps you in learning about your needs. I hope that you can have an honest conversation about your needs with your C-suite.
