How do you spot a high performing technology architect? Look for head swivels, echoes and low batteries
Whenever the members of the HSBC architecture practice come together, I get a lot of direct and difficult questions, about technology, strategy, people and many other subjects. This week at our regular Town Hall, I was asked: ‘As we approach the end of the year and think about formal performance ratings, how do you recognise a high performing architect?’
Of course, the proper answer to this question depends on the person and their context, and should be an active conversation all the time, rather than a question that gets asked and answered once a year.
However, the informal answer that there are some signals of performance which I have found to be broadly reliable. Unsurprisingly, these are based on the three attributes of an architect we seek at HSBC, and which we call Zang Jing Ge: technical excellence; communication mastery; and leadership power. These signals comprise two head swivels, some loud echoes and low batteries.
Technical Excellence: Head Swivel #1
Architects are part of a team, whether that team looks after a product, a project, a system, a business unit or the entire enterprise. And members of a team will often find themselves in a room together, facing difficult technical questions.
We believe that all architects should be technical experts. This does not mean that they need to understand every single aspect of every technology we use: that’s impossible. It also does not mean that their expertise should be confined to a particular branch of technology: deep domain knowledge of how a business operates and how we put technology together to make that possible is also technical expertise.
But they should have at least one area of deep expertise where they can be trusted to come up with the right answer most of the time, and, even more importantly, sufficiently broad understanding that they can track down the experts and get answers for the things that they don’t know.
When an architect has this combination of direct technical expertise and the ability to make the most of the expertise of others, when they are a reliable and vocal conduit to knowledge and eager to share that knowledge with others, they will experience head swivel #1: a natural tendency of the people in the room to turn to the architect for guidance when faced with a technical question they can’t answer.
Communication Mastery: Loud Echoes
Great technology architects are persistent communicators: they realise that their job is not just to think good thoughts, or even just to write them down. It is to get thoughts from their heads into the heads of others, by whatever means works for them and for their audience. (And of course, this is not one way traffic: great architects are also great listeners.)
How do you know when an architect has been successful in this form of thought transfer? It’s not enough just to see agreement or consensus: those are sometimes just signals of resignation or compliance rather than understanding.
I think that the best way to determine whether an architect has mastered communication is to listen for the echoes. If an architect has successfully created a vocabulary, embedded a set of ideas in a team, engendered beliefs, then the people around them will start talking their language. It’s even better when they have forgotten where the ideas have come from: they are now just part of the conceptual furniture (and the architect should feel good about this: this is not about egos and overt recognition).
Leadership Power: Head Swivel #2
This is very difficult to achieve, but is a strong signal of a high performing architect. If you are such an architect, you will gain reputation and respect among your team as a rational decision maker and problem solver. You will persuade people to follow your direction, even when you have no formal hierarchical authority or even governance authority to make them do so. You will lead the thinking of your team through hard, complex problems, and make sure that everybody understand the path they took.
If you do all of these things, then you will find your colleagues turn to you when all sorts of problems come up, whether they have anything to do with architecture or not. You will be known as the person who helps the team figure stuff out and make decisions. You will get the second head swivel.
In Demand: Low Batteries
The final signal does not fit any single one of the attributes of Zang Jing Ge, but is exhibited by architects who have achieved all three. If you check their phone, it will probably have low batteries, and not just by the end of the day. That’s because a genuinely high performing architect is well known and in demand. People will seek them out for advice and counsel, as well as action and decisions. Their phone will be ringing and pinging much of the time.
You may wonder how a high performing architect can go on performing highly if they subject to such demands: surely they become swamped. The answer is that this is a risk, but if they are truly great, they address this risk by sharing their knowledge - by training the next generation. But that’s a topic for another day.
