Five pieces of advice for technical leaders
Photo credit: Mathias Reding on Unsplash
What advice would you give someone taking on a new technical leadership role? As I wrote a few weeks ago, technical leadership matters, but there are few resources to learn technical leadership, so we have to rely on what we can learn from each other. I’ve been privileged to work with and for some great technical leaders who have been generous with their advice. Fortunately, advice is one of those things which gets more valuable the more you pass it on, so I thought it might be helpful to share a few bits of advice which have helped me.
Don’t panic
In the field of enterprise technology, things go wrong. All the time. If you have an operational role, then you spend much of your time dealing with incidents. If you have a change role, then you spend much of your time dealing with obstacles to delivery. And if you have embraced DevOps (as we all should) then you get to deal with incidents and change obstacles at the same time.
We spend a lot of time trying to reduce risk in operations and change: to automate incident detection and recovery; to make our systems reliable; to break change into smaller increments. And things still go wrong. All the time.
One of the things that technical leaders need to learn, quickly, is that teams will take their tone from them, and that if they project panic when things go wrong, then that panic will become contagious. However difficult it is, however much they may be terrified inside, part of the technical leader’s role is to help teams convert dramas into problems and problems into solutions.
If it helps, write ‘Don’t Panic’ in large, friendly letters on something that you always carry with you.
Hire people smarter than you
You probably got to be a technical leader because you showed technical excellence in your previous job, and to show technical excellence, you needed to be smart. You may even have been used to, and proud of, being the smartest person in the room.
When picking your team, it is easy to imagine that you won’t be able to find people smarter than you, and that, instead, you will hire people who have aptitude in particular areas, that will follow your leadership and direction, and which you will shape into a high performing team.
It’s possible to build a good team that way, but if you want to build a great team, it’s better to find people who are smarter than you, who are deeper experts, who adapt more quickly - and who could be your successors. If you have a team like that, you can build a culture of creative challenge.
It may help, when hiring, to ask not just ‘will this person do what I need them to do?’ but ‘will this person challenge me and make the whole team better?’
Embrace your ignorance
If you are successful in hiring people smarter than you, then you will spend a lot of time thinking, ‘I didn’t know that,’ or ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ It can take a while to realise that your job is not to have the answer to everything: it’s to find the people who can find the answers. Once you do realise that, though, it will be hard to ignore the mass of expertise you don’t have.
Embracing this ignorance does not mean choosing to stay in the dark. Rather, it means accepting that every day in the office will be a learning experience - and that this learning experience can be enjoyable. It’s much more fun being part of a team where people teach each other, than leading a team where everyone follows your orders.
It may help, when leading a team of experts, to explicitly play the role of the ignorant, intelligent and interested interlocutor: it will help you learn, and help your team develop their ability to explain..
Choose to lead
Leading a technology function means dealing with a lot of management tasks: hiring, budgets, resource allocation, team configuration, delivery timelines, service performance, risk and so on. And that’s just when things are going well: when things do wrong, you’re doing all that, dealing with whatever has failed, and trying not to panic.
This can be overwhelming, and it can be very tempting to focus your effort exclusively on local management: is your team running efficiently and delivering its goals? However, I think that such exclusive focus risks neglecting the role of a technical leader as a leader of the organisation: to be the person who makes the case for the power of technology, who shapes strategy and direction. Choosing to lead in this way takes effort and will - and may be rebuffed by fellow leaders who don’t understand the role of technology in the success of their organisation.
It may help to remember the words of one of my colleagues who, when faced with scepticism about their right to lead, patiently and respectfully insisted: ‘It’s our company too.’
Advocate for technologists
There will still be plenty of people, though, who think that the technology team should stay in the basement, should diligently elicit requirements and deliver features - that they should, effectively, do as they are told.
I believe that this is a waste of some of the smartest, most talented and most energetic people in any organisation - and that those people also have a rare skillset that enables them to build the systems that run your organisation.
Part of the role of the technical leader, therefore, is not just to seek their own seat at the leadership table, but to continuously advocate for respect, understanding and support for technologists.
It may help to imagine what your organisation would be like without technologists, and to use this image to help colleagues understand why technologists are some of the most valuable people in any organisation.
This list is, of course, not exhaustive, and won’t fit everybody’s style. However, I offer these wholly unoriginal bits of advice in the same spirit that they were offered to me. I find that any day when I have managed not to panic, been reminded that my team are smarter than me, have learnt something from them, lived up to my role as a leader in my organisation, and reminded people of the value of technologists, is a good day in the office.
