Leadership for Team Growth and Communication Balance
What does it mean to be an engineering leader? Pause, and invest in the team’s growth. Support others through coaching and sponsoring.
Communicating well means finding a balance between predictability and choice. This also means finding the right timing to let our teams know what they need to know without blindsiding or overwhelming them.
Expectations goals with them help them understand their progress and keep them connected with the purpose of their work. We need to use our powers as leaders to drive organizational change.
The way that we relate to our organizations may differ. We look for certainty, safety, and stability in our lives. We want to feel confident that resources like money, time, or information are available to us in a way that we cannot do our job well or achieve our goals. We also want objectives, strategy, and direction to be consistent and stay consistent the same at all times.
Deep down, we all seek meaning, importance, and status. It also means being appreciated for our work by people whose opinions mean something to us.
Feeling that these needs are threatened puts us in fight-or-flight mode, which is stressful. It harms our ability to think. It impacts our productive productivity and our well-being stress has vast adverse short-term and long-term effects on all of us. It damages the people on our teams and will hurt our business. This is why not meeting other people’s needs is expensive for organizations. We can’t guess what motivates others or what they feel threatened by. Saving an impact is a great motivator for all of us. We can also serve our significance by involving our teammates in our decisions to promote fairness and inclusivity.
Engineering leaders should ask for feedback because it’s the only thing that helps us adjust, especially in our leadership style and actions. Giving input to engineers helps with predictability. This is part of building a culture around continuous learning, a vital sign of safe teams. We can help teammates learn from each other through code reviews, mentoring, or knowledge sharing. We can also use retrospectives to discuss and improve how we work together. Post-mortems are a great tool to foster a learning culture, understand problems and drive toward solutions. It’s essential to keep in mind that the way we discuss failure on our teams will shape the culture that we have.
Besides building culture, we must ensure alignment and team involvement. We need to communicate strategic direction and relevant tactical details to them. You may have heard of a manager being a protector for their team or a fire shield or a shirt umbrella for the people who watch the excellent plays here. It’s essential to remember that the goal of a leader is to help teams stay aligned, and it’s not about make-believe. The growth framework for engineers is an engineering competency matrix. It informs job descriptions and hiring processes as well. It’s become the foundation for learning and growth. What kind of leader do I want to be? There are few straightforward answers and resolutions for much of our field’s work. At all times, we hold vast amounts of uncertainty while also trying to make forward progress. Being able to handle this kind of ambiguity can be difficult, and it’s one of the most essential and often most challenging parts of our job.
