Technology leadership matters

Photo credit: Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash

I believe that the use of technology has an outsized impact on the success of organisations, and that the quality of technical leaders has an outsized impact on the successful use of technology. Organisations which don’t make good use of technology lag their peers, and organisations without great technical leaders struggle to make good use of technology.

This means that technical leadership matters.

However, technical leadership does not seem to be well understood, and there are few resources to help people become great technical leaders. I have held many technical leadership roles in my career, and have been fortunate to have access to some outstanding leadership development and technical training - but have struggled to find help to put technology and leadership together.

As a result, I don’t claim to be a great technical leader: there’s a reason that the title of this newsletter is A Lot to Learn. However, I have worked with and for some great technical leaders, and have picked up a few ideas along the way.

It might help if I start by saying what I mean by a technical leader. I don’t just mean somebody who leads a technical team, although that is an important part of the job. I also don’t just mean somebody who is accountable for technical capabilities and services, although that is also an important part of the job. I mean somebody who does those things - and is also a leader within their organisation.

They feel the same sense of ownership and mission as executive leaders, as people who lead operational functions, or finance, or sales and marketing and so on. They don’t believe themselves to just be part of the IT team that’s kept in the basement (although they may have to fight to be let out of the basement): they assert their right and their responsibility to be organisational leaders.

I believe that, amongst many other things, a technical leader who fulfils a role like this must seek to achieve three apparent contradictions:

Evangelism and empathy

Many people become technical leaders because they really care about technology: they see the potential of technology to make people’s lives better and to make their organisation more successful. Given that most technical leaders work in organisations where most people don’t care about technology, this passion can easily become frustration. Why don’t they understand? Why don’t they just do it this way?

Great technical leaders avoid this frustration leading them to become dismissive or contemptuous of their less technically expert colleagues. They realise that they have a duty to understand and empathize with the needs and challenges of those people, to explain how things could be better, and show a path to achieving it. At the same time, they don’t let their frustration blunt their passion: they continue to make the case for change, even when it seems that no-one is listening.

Vision and autonomy

As I said earlier, technical leaders don’t just lead technical teams, but that is an important part of the job. And it can be hard to lead technical teams: they are an extreme case of knowledge workers who use their skill and expertise to get their work done. They also tend to be opinionated, grumpy and occasionally cynical: I know, as I am one of them.

Such teams do their best work when they are autonomous, trusted to make their own choices and organise themselves. However, they also do their best work in service of a coherent, inspiring vision.

The technical leader, therefore, must find the balance between creating that vision, taking accountability for (often unpopular) decisions about priorities and resource allocation, and giving teams room and power to excel. This is hard and varies by team: I have got it wrong many times.

Confidence and humility

Imposter syndrome seems to be an occupational hazard of being a technical leader: the leader’s non-technical peers look to them for deep expertise, and may praise them for getting to grips with topics that they could never understand. But when the leader goes back to their own team, they face people with far deeper expertise, and feel like a fraud. Are they still a true technologist, or are they just one Wikipedia page ahead of everyone else?

Sometimes it may be tempting to delegate technical understanding to the expert team members and focus only on the non-technical aspects of the role: resource decisions, stakeholder management, hiring and so on. I believe that to make this choice is to choose not to be a technical leader.

A preferable way to navigate this apparent contradiction is to realise that it isn’t a contradiction at all. It is impossible to be a deep expert in all aspects of technology, and it is the responsibility of the technical leader to build a team which carries the expertise their organisation needs. Yet, anyone who has reached a role as a technical leader, and who retains their enthusiasm for technology is more expert than other people in their organisation: their insights and vision are valuable, and are not diminished by drawing on the expertise of others.

For a great technical leader, confidence is not fraud, and humility is not weakness.

There is much more to technical leadership than these three things. I don’t know them all: I’m still learning. If you have good ideas, please share them in the comments.

I do have one further thought, though. I said above that I have struggled to find resources to help technical leaders develop. That’s not entirely true: I have struggled to find formal resources in the form of training courses, books and other literature. However, I have benefited extensively from mentoring, sometimes in the form of a defined mentoring relationship, but more often in the form of friendly advice, of someone being willing to take my call and listen to my problems. Thanks to all of the many people who have helped me.

I suspect that most technical leaders would not claim to be great: I don’t. However, I think that we all have something to offer each other, and to those who will succeed us. I think we have a duty to be generous with our experience: perhaps we are the resource that has been missing.