My Leadership User Manual
The first thing I want to know about a team is who they are as people first, software engineers, product managers, designers, QA/Es second. I do this synchronously, in 1:1s, and asynchronously, with User Manuals.
What are User Manuals?
A User Manual is a simple survey to be completed individually. It’s inspired by the one my co-founder wrote for our previous team and the one from Nobl.io. Nowadays it’s becoming more mainstream.
When I joined my current role, I talked with my team about User Manuals, as well as the kind of manager I strive to be. The opportunity to write about it was when I answered the State of Engineering Leadership — 2021 survey from Plato, a mentorship organisation for software engineering leaders and managers used by companies like Gitlab and Segment. Some of those questions (see below) are part of what I call a Leadership User Manual.
What does “Growing as a Leader” mean to you? In your opinion, what are some great skills people need to grow as a leader?
To quote a famous podcast intro: “Leaders aren’t born, they’re made”. To me, leadership is a combination of personality, behaviour and experience. Personality traits are both genetic and evolved. Experience is acquired, and behaviours can be learnt, unlearnt, re-learnt. It’s the combination of them that makes up someone’s unique leadership style.
Many leaders choose to manage because they are interested in solving people puzzles. Many great leaders are not in management roles. However, if you have a manager who is not a leader…well, that’s a very expensive problem.
My view is that a good leader is a practitioner of Allocentrism. It means being focused on others. Saying the same thing differently, a good leader has a high Emotional Intelligence quotient. They can see from multiple pairs of eyes, also known as Empathy.
They can be vulnerable without being weak. For example, they have the strength to say, “I don’t know, but I’m going to learn”. They are kind. Kindness begets greatness. They hold themselves and others accountable.
They are also resilient. Resilience means being able to fail, learn from failure and come back on top. Not necessarily to the same state of mind — that’s robustness, but to a new, enriched one. A great definition is from Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows:
“Resilience is the ability to bounce or spring back into shape, position, etc. after being pressed or stretched. Elasticity. The ability to recover strength, spirits, good humour or any other aspect quickly.”
I think someone grows as a leader when they can create self-sufficient teams that inherit the leader’s traits and behaviours and keep them long after the leader is gone or they move on to other teams.
Tell us a little about your growth as a leader so far
How do we become who we are? We see others behave in ways we relate to, and we see good outcomes coming from what they do. My leadership style is not fixed because it’s being shaped by every interaction with my teams and other leaders.
One leader said to me: “We can solve all the problems, but we can’t solve all the problems at once”. In the same way, we can’t make everyone happy at all times, but this doesn’t mean we should forget about it. She’s right.
Another one said: “Evelina, always explain why you’re doing what you’re doing and how it benefits your team”. He’s a wise man.
A third one said: “Success comes from Intelligence x Energy Squared”. In other words, be a doer. I shared my motto with my teams: “If you see something, say something and do something”.
I’m thankful I met these people and they’ve influenced my thinking through their fair, honest feedback and kind encouragement.
What major challenges have you seen while growing as a leader? — Let’s deep dive into these challenges
Perhaps the biggest challenge for someone like me is to be given the chance to lead in the first place, not to mention the ongoing support to develop as a leader. Opportunities are scarce, and sometimes you need to wait so long that you might just create some for yourself. Starting your own company is an example. I’ve done that a few times.
I say “someone like me” because women hold less than 20% of all senior leadership roles. Technical leadership, for example, CTO roles, are less than 1%.
Secondly, growing as a leader means constant learning, sometimes accelerated. I’ve been in roles where I had to learn at a large scale but at a decent speed and ones where I learnt at a smaller scale but at incredible speed. Now I’m in a role where I’m learning at both astonishing speed and scale, inside Europe’s fastest-growing startup of all time.
Learning is not always comfortable. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes I sacrifice family time to read yet another thing that “I should know”. As part of growing as a leader, I learnt the difference between surviving and thriving. I need my health, mental and physical, to survive and I need great work to thrive. Good boundaries are difficult to establish but they are essential. Setting them requires a lot of strength and self-awareness.
What top solutions have you employed to deal with these challenges?
The “best advice” I got when dealing with any challenge was to be fearless and relentless. Great, but how do you actually do that? To me, it means being resilient: admitting fear, failure and asking for advice and support. Not everyone will offer it, but it won’t stop me from asking.
For example, it took me several years to find a genuine, passionate mentor. I asked and got rejected. Maybe I wasn’t that interesting or I was asking in the wrong way. I kept learning and doing interesting stuff until someone said ‘Yes’. And then another said ‘Yes’. And then another.
Then Techstars introduced me to Mentor Madness, where mentors give you feedback on your business and your team, from dawn to dusk, for several weeks in a row. This is how I learnt to cherry-pick advice from 100 mentors with conflicting opinions. More than that… I’m not sure :)
Another ongoing challenge for me is being self-aware when my decisions are biased by previous experience. No matter how well-prepared and experienced we are, our decisions don’t always lead to the expected outcomes. Just like Machine Learning has false positives and false negatives, we humans risk overfitting our bad decisions to good outcomes and vice-versa.
My solution is to journal the decision-making process in writing. It shows the context of the decision and the effort and consideration put into it. Writing things down seems slow and counter-intuitive at first. I strongly believe that practice and intent lead to fast, targeted feedback and short learning loops. I wrote at length about how asynchronous communication can help us mitigate thinking biases in this post. Probably it struck a chord because it was featured by Medium.
I wrote about other typical engineering leadership issues, like scaling, prioritisation, communication and team bonding in this other series, as well as my version of solutions for each. One size doesn’t fit all. Continuous learning brings adaptability.
What techniques have helped you to take time for yourself from your day-to-day work?
I laughed so much reading this article in The Guardian about going for a walk in the rain. I love walking. Some people have their Eurekas in the shower. I have mine when I walk in a park. I’m trying to schedule at least one hour of walking whenever I can during lunchtime.
In a remote work situation, moving is crucial for health. There are plenty of studies about the effectiveness of walking to increase immunity, decrease stress and depression and keep a healthy mind inside a healthy body. I’m encouraging my new team to give Walks & Talks a try. It’s about reducing meeting and video fatigue by having audio-only 1:1s in a park or on a quiet street, walking the dog.
What are your top 3 actionable pieces of advice for the readers to help them grow as a leader?
My first actionable piece is to find good role models to learn with and from. Some will be senior leaders and some will be peers and teammates. I learn best by observing how they do things and asking them questions. The first bit is more challenging remote but not impossible.
The other side is to become a mentor yourself. Coaching and mentoring are the best ways to learn new things, understand other people and grow as a leader.
My second piece of advice is to experiment with mindsets and metacognition. What I mean is to apply thinking frameworks in unusual ways. For example, applying System Thinking to humans and Design Thinking to software. It gives me an edge in terms of seeing something different. It also helps me reduce biased thinking. Someone at work sent me a list of mental models from Farnam Street. It’s amazing how much we can learn in a single conversation.
My final piece of advice is to be mindful that a leader leads and manages a team of humans. If we want our teams to be high performant, productivity is the wrong metric to optimise for. The productivity metric helps for processes (e.g. communication flows, decision-making). Optimising for good processes is how we get engaged and motivated human beings. As a parallel, in Distributed Systems, we optimise for resilience to get reliability, not vice-versa.
I believe that High Performance is when Intrinsic Motivation meets Work Satisfaction. Our role as leaders is to increase work satisfaction and coach folks about increasing their own motivation. That could be by finding meaning in their work, through ownership, accountability, kind and honest feedback
Work satisfaction brings performance and it’s not a soft metric. It’s positively correlated to engagement, high-quality work, advocacy and network effects.
The cost of work dissatisfaction, which comes out as overly sarcastic and aggressive attitudes, presenteeism and burnout, is huge. Not only in cultural value but in dollar value as well. Gallup, who analysed 27 million employees found that “when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition”.
More recently, Github and Microsoft have busted a lot of myths about productivity and performance and created their SPACE framework to capture “the most important dimensions of developer productivity: satisfaction and well-being; performance; activity; communication and collaboration; and efficiency and flow”.
What tested resources do you recommend for the readers to grow as a leader?
I listen to audiobooks and podcasts while I walk in the park. I have a huge list of favourites but I’ll shorten it to must-reads: An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, by Will Larson (he has a great blog too), Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams For Fast Flow, by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton and Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean, by Kim Scott.
