Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 80: New Team Leads and Constant Follow Up

Episode Date: October 29, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I keep up with new tech as a team lead? I manage a team. A manager from a different team wants me to run everything I do in my team by him. What do I do? Jamison mentions this by Charity Majors on the pendulum between technical and people leadership. Jamison also mentions this HBR article on employee happiness.

It takes more than sweet Emacs skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 80. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. You said Emacs, so I have to save him! It compels me. For what it's worth, I haven't used Emacs in like 15 years. I don't know why. I just took the other path down the road. But it definitely takes more than great Emacs skills to be a great engineer. that much it does it also takes significant pinky strength i don't know for for someone who sure likes vim a lot i think the editor debate is maybe

the most boring conversation you can have in technology yeah tabs versus spaces is much more fun yeah it's right on the same level as that i i don't care that much what is this what are we doing soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical subjects man it's just so smooth when you say it i had an extra pat of butter on my toast this morning which side was it on though speaking of dumb debates you butter your toast are my butter side upper or butter side downer yeah i think that's yeah that's the dr seuss reference right yep that guy was really political by the way really oh yeah when i read his books as an adult i'm like oh oh wow this guy was really saying something huh i mean one fish two fish

has a red fish and a blue fish i guess that could be like communist liberal and conservative yeah oh no yeah you're right it's republican fish democrat oh yeah okay okay yeah communist so maybe he's talking specifically about about uh the democratic side and i don't think the far left wing versus the center left that's where the real debate happens one fish two fish is a political allegory for our time and i will go back and read it through those eyes but first i'm gonna read this question sounds good this is from a listener z hey guys i'm curious to hear your thoughts on the transition from web developer to becoming a team lead is there such a thing as taking this management role too early in one's career i'm about five years into it and i recently took on

the team lead role i'm feeling more out of touch with the code base is this purely a matter of putting in some extra time or is this sort of deeper understanding of the code base not part of a team leads responsibilities in general how does a team lead go about introducing new technologies when they don't have as much time to actually implement them thank you for your insights and for putting together a great podcast you're welcome so far yeah it's not too late yeah to jump the shark i like how z snuck two questions in there yeah no it's not too early that's the first answer five years feels like a not outrageously fast or slow i don't know what the average time is but seeing someone be a team lead five years in i'm just i don't know that

seems fine yeah i recently was looking at someone's linkedin profile a more or less famous twitter personality and this individual had been a software developer for like a year and a half and was then promoted to like director of engineering for a well-known tech company so you know five years feels downright slow compared to that there are many paths i guess uh yeah no set amount of time five years is fine longer than five years is fine shorter could be fine too and it's not a one-way door if you take this uh position as team lead which it looks like you have you can always go back you might have to change jobs to do it but you can definitely go back you're not locked in for life yeah that's a good point uh charity majors i think she's the

one that said this she started she worked at parse and facebook and then started an infrastructure company um she said that she feels like the most effective technical people are the ones that bounce back and forth between senior developer and and kind of lower level management like team lead um because they have good insight into kind of the organizational side but they're still in the technology enough to contribute technically interesting i'll tell you what there's nothing that makes you a good follower like being a leader for a while yeah you know good team member yeah i mean in my last company we actually rotated the team lead assignment we've talked about this on the show before so following the logic from uh who did you say charity majors yeah so following

charity majors logic i was just all over that just nailed it you're prescient um okay what about the second question or not oh i almost called zx that's probably really offensive sorry z um what about the second question how do you how do you stay in touch yeah feeling feeling well there's even two more these questions are recursive uh there are two more questions in here one is like i feel kind of out of touch with the technology the other one is how do i make technical decisions or help the team make technical decisions when i feel out of touch okay wow three questions in one z this is like this is very efficient you're going to be a great team lead yeah key to team lead efficiency is sneaking in a bunch of stuff in what looks like one thing

so three story points that should be three stories each story point is actually a whole epic like a russian doll nested i so i have felt out of touch with technology when i have been a team lead and it was real distressing to me because i thought my value on the team up to that point had been being very in touch with the technology knowing exactly what's going on and knowing how to fix it and where it was weak and where potential problems could occur and what needed to be added and i just more more and more things kept changing that i couldn't keep up with because of other responsibilities and i think what i ended up realizing was that i was personally less

productive technically in the code base but my job was to make the team overall more productive and i could do that without knowing the code base in great detail by knowing the team and knowing the context around the team better so now you know the people but not the code as much yeah i mean i knew the people before but i know i know them differently now or i knew them differently then and i also knew a lot more about how the team interacted with other teams and the and the rest of the company so i might not know yeah how tricky this feature might be but i know how important it is to the rest of the business interesting or or who's like who's blocked by it and who needs it or what stuff is less important that

kind of thing okay so you're saying that taking you can see this as getting out of touch with the technology or you can see it as an investment in other kinds of information that is even more valuable to your team i think so and it's not individual team members can still know and participate in all these things but it is more your responsibility to do it so i've had two different styles of team leads looking back over the years and the one style is like the super in touch has a history with the technology and the code base and the company and knows what to do in many technical situations then the other kind of team lead is super hands-off doesn't really have any interest in the technology um and you know what i've enjoyed working for both of those

kinds of people the uh the super in touch person is great because you can get their insights the super hands-off person is great because it stretches you to push yourself to learn more and take more of the ownership of making important decisions on yourself so i mean in both in both those situations it can be a very effective team leadership dynamic i mean it takes a while for your knowledge to decay too it sounds like z has moved uh within the company to be a team lead so presumably we're working as an individual contributor in the code base and you still know a lot of stuff uh so it's not like you just suddenly know nothing but i i don't think you should be spending time on your own digging into the code base outside of work to kind of keep up

i feel like that's not a great use of your time yeah i don't know i don't think it's outrageously fast but i'd say if you want to make sure you stay in touch just demand that every single code review configuration change everything just has to go through you every little decision that'll make sure you stay in touch yeah we haven't talked about that enough that is an anti-pattern you as a team lead have great power to torpedo your team's productivity by trying to stay in touch and taking on feature work and doing things that are that are in the critical path of your team if you want to do some technical work still that's great um but it should be things that no one will be mad if it takes twice as long because you get pulled into meetings

or there's some disaster you have to go rescue and it shouldn't be leading core feature work definitely not yeah you also oh go ahead nope you go ahead so z also mentions introducing new technologies yeah i wanted to talk about that too yeah tell me teach me stuff so he said he asks or he or she asks how does a team lead go about introducing new technologies without having as much time to actually implement those new technologies. And I think what's being asked here is, like, okay, if I don't have a lot of time

to experiment with new tools, technologies, languages, whatever, how can I be relied upon to make these important team lead decisions? And I think maybe there's an assumption in this question that Z thinks that it's the lead's job to make these decisions. But I would challenge that and say it's actually the lead's job

to foster an environment where the team can make those decisions productively without you being the one to like bless it now you can nudge and push back and and challenge things but ultimately a healthy team makes these decisions um on their own more or less at least it feels like it's on their own if you feel like you need to make all the important decisions because you're the lead I think you're going to limit your team's potential. Have you heard horror stories about a team lead that just really loves the technology and shoves it down a team's throat? I feel like I have, but I can't think of any instances.

If that ever happened near me, I would shut that down pretty hard. I know it happens all the time. I've heard so many stories about how the team lead either loves some new thing, but they're not in a position to lead the development of it enough. so the team is just kind of like floundering or they love some old thing that the team hates i don't know yeah it's it's not a great um i think you can lead the team in making sure they have a framework for evaluating technical decisions and making them quickly yeah and you can raise important questions too yeah and you can also throw in options but yeah you you

shouldn't be the one who's deciding we're going to use react angular ember view whatever tried to combine them all into one word and i just said i just said them all right but you didn't put any spaces between them so it came out great yeah that's true your front-end bias is showing jameson yeah so i i would say a good way to think about this as the team lead is to consider what the next level is for you in your own personal growth. And if you are, if your team is depending on you to make important technical decisions, that's going to prevent you from taking on more responsibility. And basically the crux is you don't scale as an individual, but if you build empowerment

into your team so that they can make these kinds of decisions without you, then you're setting yourself up for success and being able to take on more responsibility without feeling, you know, extra burden. and basically you become more scalable yeah i like what you said earlier about there are several different styles of team lead too and and i think i've described the more people-oriented style in in my experience and you don't have to do that you could be a much more like a super senior dev kind of more more like the architect type yeah that's been me in the past when i was in a management role absolutely oh one more thing i wanted to say there's an hbr article about

employee happiness and how it's related to your boss's ability to do your own job and it cites some study that says that they found that employees whose bosses could could do the work that they are doing are happier oh because they they feel like they're understood a little bit more i think is the is the subtext um instead of just this faceless like capital m manager that's just ordering people to do things they feel a little more in touch that really resonates with me that's fascinating um it's been pretty rare that i've had a boss that i felt could do my job or has or had done my job in the past but i've had them and now that you mentioned it i feel like i've always had a special connection with those managers and now it's because of science

the harvard business review is not science it's like fancy think pieces but it has the word harvard in it so they're weighty think pieces yeah uh yeah so so i think there's there is value in still being in touch with the technology but it it can definitely you have a lot more on your plate than just the technology now so just to give you a sense of where my head is when you said hbr i had no idea what that was despite the fact that i literally rode my bike through the harvard campus this morning yeah you didn't they didn't hand it out to you no they weren't like welcome to the home of the hbr i mean it has the word harvard in it i'm probably gonna edit this out because this is dumb and boring but i feel like it's like a spin-off kind of it's not it's

not like the official campus publication it's just like people like harvard and think they're smart So we licensed the word Harvard. But I like this article because I agree with it, basically. That's the summary. Yeah, I can see that. I can definitely see that. That's cool. Okay, have we answered Z's question?

I think, Z, good luck with your new team lead role. This is going to be challenging for you to strike the balance that works for you. But figure out where your strengths are. Are your strengths in leading people or are your strengths in staying connected with the technology and guiding people to use that technology effectively? or somewhere in the middle but don't just discount the one because you feel like you're drifting away from your technological roots um you know you might want to embrace that actually and use it as an opportunity to empower your teams and see what that looks like all right question answered

maybe it was zed this whole time zed ah we're so biased yep to our american a through z all right on to the next question do you want to read it dave yep this comes from a listener named alfie who writes i've recently been promoted to managing a team oh this is this week's theme team leads i've recently been promoted to managing a team and i love it my colleague also got promoted to managing a team i am a quote move fast and learn what works and what doesn't kind of person he is a quote i want you to run your decisions by me first kind of person the problem comes in that i cannot figure out what he expects me to run by him and what decisions i can make on my own he'll call me out for something and then make a similar decision on his own it's gotten

to the point where i'm afraid every decision will come with a slack message from him and i will wonder if i should just run everything by him do you have any ideas what i should do i'm willing to try anything here i just had this image in my head of like you say a thing in a meeting and then like you just hear a little slack notification immediately hey run that you hear it in your boss's computer one of the things i i edited out on accident was um the other manager's team has some overlap with his so there's a little bit of uh shared responsibility it looks like okay have you considered asking this person this manager to run all of his decisions by you give him i don't know you might want to run that by me maybe yeah fight fire with fire

slack messages fight slack messages with slack messages i just want to question all the assumptions you know i just really want to make sure we're doing the right thing and you don't even have to ask him to run his decisions by you just run them by yourself And then say, if he's really good at this, he'll come back and say, well, I'm not really sure we should be questioning our assumptions. You might want to run that by me. Before you question assumptions, you should think about if I'm okay with that. Tell him that you have modeled his behavior in your head and you already know that he

would be okay with it. so you're just gonna go ahead and do it yeah listen this is what's in lean startup is you basically figure out what people are gonna say and then you do it yeah there's there's not much there to understand so i got it um i can tell you what though not as a leader not knowing what decisions are yours to make versus those that you need to seek guidance on is a very uncomfortable position to be in and very frustrating have you heard the word kafka-esque i've heard it but i'm not educated enough could you use it in a sentence i could use it in a sentence i think but it would probably not make sense to anyone who actually knows what that word means okay well i don't know

that i know what it means either but i know what i think it means and i think it means things are very arbitrary there's this feeling of like faceless bureaucracy that's not so much what i'm talking about but also just like arbitrary weird things happen for for no reason and that kind of sounds like what you're talking about where you don't really understand the boundaries of your responsibility or authority you just kind of like wait for things to happen you might want to run those definitions by me before you uh start saying them out loud um i just googled how am i right uh so it says here characteristic of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of franz kafka's fictional world so i don't know enough about

that world he he wrote a book called the trial which is about this guy that gets um arrested and and told he has to attend a trial for a crime that happened but he can't actually find out what the crime was or what the charges were and the whole book is just him like wandering this city trying to find someone that knows anything about it and it's it's it feels like an allegory for business a lot of times she's like no one knows what's happening but everyone is very certain that what you are doing is wrong and soon you'll get in trouble oh man okay so yes totally applicable here okay how do you what do you do in that situation um so i believe that you and i have just stumbled upon the crux of this of this issue which is an overlapping team charter where you

have to run stuff past someone but you're not clear what stuff you have to run past them and what stuff you don't you've got to in my opinion at this point you need to sit down and clearly identify a process so that you two can make progress without hindering each other with this follow-up and these like clarifications and and i don't know what you call these run it past you things but um you've got to sit down and have that have that out because this is not a sustainable long-term situation and if you have to run every decision past someone else there may as well only be one of you right and i mean it should be you clearly so there's one way to find out who should survive though yeah cage match uh with what weapons i'm thinking just put them in a ball pit

and the last person alive or maybe not that's a little gruesome you were not kidding i was just trying to merge the idea of a ball pit in a cage match it's really not coming together for me a yeah ball pit cage match i don't know i think it came together that feels pretty self-explanatory what would you do one of you is unconscious overheated from the sweaty uh yeah it turns out they don't have good ventilation the plastic balls they use are not breathable that'll be the next evolution of the ball pit perk they'll all be made out of gore-tex or something so they would like wick sweat away and cost thousands of dollars you can sleep on them

and yeah you won't wake up sweaty yeah where does it go when it gets whipped away i don't know they all turned brown though okay uh so cage match i mean uh it it sounds like i i agree with you that that this is not a great situation and you need to define them clearly in a little more detail alfie mentioned they don't feel like their their manager is really engaged enough to help resolve this issue right so it kind of comes down to to you and this other person talking it out have you have you tried just i mean you dealt with it but have you talked it out explicitly and said hey this is confusing to me it would be helpful for me to to delineate

these responsibilities more clearly um so so my team can move the way i want it to yeah exactly so neither of us are hindered try and make it a good versus evil thing if you can do that if you can say i am on the side of of justice and your totalitarian approach to leadership is harming the good guys and i'm going to take you down i think that that could only lead to a productive healthy conversation in the ball pit in the look there's a there's a really good chance here that the overlap between these two teams is actually product ownership area where it's like things that this team does affect this other team yeah yeah i mean you could think of maybe it's like a front end and a back end team sure or two two related systems that share an api surface right

so maybe maybe the root of the issue is actually technical and there needs to be more decoupling here and you can identify the root cause even if you don't have an api where you your team produces something the other team uses or vice versa you could think of it as an api and think of it as this is a boundary that you don't really control what goes on on the other side but you need to make sure that you don't ruin their lives and then create kind of like a an api contract in air quotes between the teams how you can deliver stuff without needing to change or affect them too much and then i mean just with apis they do change and you version them their their approaches to making changes in a in a way that won't disrupt other people too um treat them more like computers

i guess is what i'm saying that's my management advice treat these humans more like sounds weird when i say it put them in a doctor container yeah yeah you'd probably need kubernetes for humans so when you talked about um needing to add clarity to your responsibilities in my head i see this conversation going like alfie says hey i'm unsure what what i do without needing your permission and then this person is like well everything all of it yeah you just gotta run it all by me and then it turns into this power struggle of like who controls more of the overlap you know how do you avoid that well at that point you just need to do underhanded things to make their team look bad until eventually he caves fill all their whiteboard markers with ketchup so they try and

right on the whiteboard and just squirts out everywhere. Perfect. Oh, what an idiot. I can see you've played politics before. Yes. I've won plenty of interdepartmental conflicts.

It's not your first rodeo. Yeah. I've replaced a lot of coffee with ground-up pencil shavings. i've never drank coffee so it might be it might be a little off on the flavor but just a little bit okay so i have a story about this at a previous company i was in a management position leading about I guess about 40 engineers and my boss was the CTO and there was one point where

there was a decision to be made that I thought clearly fell within my purview to make this decision and my boss swooped in and actually kind of accidentally made the decision for me and kind of overruling me actually which you know in your boss's scenario that's I guess within your boss's purview generally i mean you you do eventually report up to this person um but i got really upset about that i was pretty mad and and i so i sat down with them later and i was like hey i you know like what's my role here like if i'm not making these decisions what the heck decisions can i make you know and i said i feel like i have to run everything by you because it was kind of a side effect of a lingering issue and so we actually sat down and we we nailed down

specifically areas where he felt i should have complete autonomy and then areas where he wanted to be wanted to participate and then of course he wrote himself a little bit of a blank check and said i reserve the right to participate in any of these decisions because you know ultimately i own them as do you and even though i trust you to do it i expect to be able to participate at my own discretion which i which i can respect and appreciate this scenario is a little different because it's actually two people who are peers instead of a subordinate relationship. And I would still sit down with them.

And even though you can't rely on your shared boss to help you negotiate or navigate this situation, I would still sit down with them and say, look, in the interest of moving fast, being able to have autonomy and growing the team as we need to, we need to sketch out our areas of responsibility. And you might even use the term team charters

and say within the team charter, you're fully autonomous. You make the decisions you want. In cross-charter issues, that's when we collaborate but let's make sure we minimize that set of things and i'll bet you could have a pretty productive conversation in those terms yeah that sounds very reasonable as long as you do it dave it sounds like you would be great at that conversation i don't know i get pretty upset when people i mean i was pretty mad at my boss and and i think

he could sense it and he wouldn't what is well what does pretty mad look like for dave like like saying bad things about him to other people um like saying oh i'm so upset that this happened and yeah like uh i mean it's not like i put ketchup anyone in anyone's whiteboard i'll mature someday to words i'm still stuck at the condiment stage i think that was from freud i just have this image in my head of you know how kids will like sit next to each other in the back seat of a car and one of them will just like keep scooting over yeah into the person's personal space yeah yeah and then you just like you suddenly you just get the whole back seat and the person in the other seat has to like move to the floor or something i don't

know that's what's happening here right yeah yeah are you saying that maybe it's a power play on the part of the other manager i don't know if it could be well it definitely could be it also could be a deliberate power play but the effect of it is the same as a power play where you know if you just kind of go along then suddenly they're slowly yeah it's like it's like those dudes that spread their legs super wide on the train they just like slowly take over and then their legs spread the whole length of the car and they have the car to themselves you're just you'll just become this person's subordinate soon wait i think what you're saying yeah is eventually you're gonna have a new boss if you do nothing yeah exactly you will run all decisions by him and that's called your boss

and eventually he's gonna approach your boss and say look you know we may as well make this official i'm practically the guy's boss anyway and then he moves to the next cart and then your boss will have a new boss oh man your boss gets pushed off the off the car seat yeah this guy's a genius he's unlocked the secret yeah i i really like what you said dave about um going to him and talking to him about it and and especially making it about helping the teams work effectively because i think this person probably wants that yep i think so too all right have we answered the question pretty much okay good luck alfie alfie said uh in what we didn't mention that at worst case he could just quit like yeah yep so try that if what we said doesn't work try that

okay how can people get their own questions answered dave if you would like to be subjected to the same terrible advice that we give every week for your own personal situation feel free to hit softskills.audio and click the ask a question button you can leave as much detail or as little as you want and you can even remain anonymous we have terrible advice for every situation yes even yours no situation is too small for our terrible advice yeah all right thank you so much for listening we'll catch you next week thanks bye