Leadership coaching for software development managers
I recently spoke at Southern Fried Agile 2016 on the Topic “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect”
Check out this interview I did on the Agile Amped podcast where I spoke about connecting with others as well as the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader.
You became a highly technical expert. You found that your expertise was critical to your success. The geekier you got, the more you got paid.
And then it happened.
One day your boss came to you and said
You replied:
But it was too late. Now what? You’re supposed to figure out the people stuff?
It turns out that leading people is VERY different from technical expertise. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said
When human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why physics is easy and sociology is hard.
And he’s exactly right. But there is hope. I started my career as a geek – a hands on technologist who bought my fist computer with money I saved up on my paper route. I worked in startups and in Fortune 500 companies – and I learned the secrets to being able to lead people – as a geek, leading geeks.
You can learn it, too.
Here are the four levels of thinking you need to develop in order to become a great geek leader:
Perspective: I perform with excellence
I need more than great geek skills to succeed. I need to lead myself – would I follow me? In addition to my technical talent, I know that I need to learn about business, and about how to work with others.
Perspective: The team performs with excellence
One is too small a number to achieve greatness. I need team members to want to help me so that together we can deliver bigger, more important work than I could do by myself. My influence comes from relationships, not formal power.
Perspective: I grow a team of great performers
As “the boss” of a team, I need to help my team members grow in their ability to lead so that our team can create even more capacity – and further increase our impact as a team. We perform together, and I become a better leader as they become good followers. My influence is from permission, not position.
Perspective: I think about succession – developing other leaders
As a leader, I need to equip the leaders who work for me to build their own teams – to become team leaders who develop other team leaders – moving from creating followers to creating other leaders. My influence is from investment in others, not from title or role.
Podcast reviews on iTunes
Living in the heart of NASCAR country even for just a couple of years I’ve already had great opportunities to study and learn from people in the motor sports industry.
The more I pick up the more I realize how much I still have to learn!
I recently had the opportunity to take a tour of the Stewart Haas racing facility in Kannapolis North Carolina. It is astonishing to understand just how much technology and complexity goes into these 200 mph cars.
NASCAR teams recruit and maintain some of the most talented people in the world to be able to make their cars go just a little faster than the other guy around the track.
One area of the campus that really stuck out to me was the investment they made in their pit crew training facilities.
I have heard it said that races are won or lost in the pit. That could well be true. Just this season, I have seen a race decided by 1/100 of a second! Successful pit stops depend on fast, flawless, complex choreographed execution.
In 12 seconds (or less) a NASCAR pit crew hits 40 lug nuts, changes four tires, makes suspension adjustments, fills up the gas tank with fuel, clears the windshield, makes airflow adjustments and sends the driver on his way.
Because of the speed, agility, strength, and precision required to complete a successful pit stop NASCAR teams recruit top athletes from major college sports programs and from other professional sports.
So what do NASCAR pit athletes have to do with geeks?
Time is short, and the job is so complex that there’s just not any room for mistakes.
Whether you are the driver, the fuel man, the Jack man, for changing tires, everything you do impacts everyone else on the team. Everything they do impacts you. You have to support each other – and that means knowing a lot of THEIR job, too.
The only way that complex, fast moving systems can work is if the experts know more than just their silo.
This means that you need to invest in learning about what other people do. Not just the technical stuff, but also the business stuff.
What are you studying in addition to your area of expertise?
NASCAR pit crews have to work perfectly.
It’s really like an orchestra. Success completely depends on each player playing their part well and perfectly coordinated with the other team members.
This means that they have to train together. They train
When you can perform at an elite level, often times the difference between winning and losing is actually in mindset, emotions, and teamwork.
Team trust takes a long time to build, and even just one sideways comment from a teammate can take it off track.
Your ability to deliver great solutions depends on teamwork. What are you doing to build it in your team?
One of the things that I hear fairly regularly is that technology teams would like to improve their execution when it comes to technology projects for the business, but they “just can’t find the time” to pull people away from the real work to think about things like soft skills and business insights.
Pit crews know that training doesn’t take you away from the real work. Multi-disciplinary training is the work. These guys study their own job backward, forward and inside out. They practice their moves over and over and over again. Training in their area of expertise is their job and training with the team is their job.
“When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare”
Pit crews don’t think that they’ll stop working and THEN start training. Pit crews know that training is the work.
Your ability to achieve does depend on your technical expertise. It also depends on your ability to work with other people, and your understanding of the business drivers that make people hire you for the work.
What are you doing today to make training a part of the work you do each week? Each month? This year?
Based on what you have read, what will you do to prepare for your work the same way that a NASCAR pit crew repairs?
Let me know! Email me at coach@BrightHillGroup.com
One of the things I learned when I worked in technology; and now as a coach working with highly technical experts is that sometimes we get stuck “in the weeds” with our heads down focused on personally delivering work.
Why is that? Because we have built our careers on that – our ability to DO the work ourselves has been what made us successful. That has worked – we’ve been able to deliver great technical solutions and our bosses have counted on us to be the smartest person in the room on our technology platform of choice. Our knowledge, skill and capabilities have led to our success.
All of that works – but only to a specific point in our career. I’ve got a client who was a key contributor in technical solutions for many many years. Over time she got promoted to where she was a team lead, a manager, and now a director overseeing a team of highly technical experts. So what did she do? She focused on delivery, carrying out her part of the work and counted on her smart, passionate team members to “do their part.”
This got her in trouble because the people on her team didn’t always prioritize work the way her bosses wanted work prioritized, and since she was so focused on doing her own work, she didn’t recognize the problem until it was too late.
Her problem was her mindset. She was thinking “My ‘real job’ is to do the hands on geek work, and this ‘managing people’ thing is add on. It’s a ‘necessary evil’ that I have to ‘get out of the way’ so I can focus on the ‘important stuff.‘”
It turns out that team members don’t just automatically focus their work on the right stuff. They don’t magically know what’s most relevant to the business folks who pay their salaries. They work on hard problems, on refactoring, on doing elegant work – but that might not be the most important stuff.
And here’s where my client can make a huge difference in her team’s performance. She has seen herself as an individual contributor who adds on the people stuff. Instead she should see herself as the leader responsible for delivering great business solutions.
A man walks up to a construction site where he sees several bricklayers working on a wall. He asks one of the brick masons “What are you working on?” the first worker looks at him like he’s an idiot and says “I’m laying bricks! What does it look like?”
He walks up to the second brick mason and says “What are you working on?” This guy shrugs his shoulders and replies “I’m building a wall.”
He approaches the third man and asks the same question. This mason pauses, turns around, looks carefully at his questioner and with excitement in his voice says “I’m building a majestic cathedral. It’s going to be amazing!”
The third mason’s walls are just as high, strong and straight as the other two, but he has the vision to understand how the work he is doing matters to the overall project.
As you move up in your career, you need to begin to think like this mason. In fact, you’ll see a real breakthrough when you realize that your “real job” is not doing the technical work, but it’s to make sure that the right technical work is done at the right time at the right quality level to deliver the value that the business is asking for.
You need to think like a general contractor, not like a bricklayer. The bricklayer is focused on technical excellence, but doesn’t necessarily understand WHY his work matters to the whole project. He is so intent on his part of the solution that he may not notice if the entire project goes off course, or is in danger of failure.
When you begin to see yourself as the person who is responsible for orchestrating the work of others to deliver, rather than as the one who delivers the work through personal effort, you’ll be able to MULTIPLY your effectiveness.
Adding value through your personal work is additive. Sure you’re smart and can do work better and faster than two other people doing the technical work – but what if you used your super powers to hire “A” players and organized the projects so that they were in their sweet spots. Each of them is delivering double what an average performer is delivering, and you’re overseeing a team of them. The value returned is FAR higher.
At this point you may be thinking: “Tom, I’ve spent my career developing great tech skills. And I’ve worked with a bunch of bosses who didn’t know the difference between java and javascript. I’m NOT going to give that up and become Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss”
The Pointy Haired Boss is clueless. He plays buzzword bingo and somehow navigates politics and survives in spite of his cluelessness. You can be incredibly productive as a leader of your team without losing your credibility.
You don’t have to give up those skills. Really – you got where you are by being smart, breaking down problems into manageable steps, taking massive action and fixing things that broke along the way.
All of those skills are applicable to being the general contractor. Sometimes you may need to step in an fix a wall, or work on electrical or plumbing issues – and that matters – but what matters even more is your understanding of how those pieces fit together to deliver high value, reasonably priced solutions to really painful business problems your company is facing.
The fact is that as you shift to being the GC, you will have to accept that you’re not the “smartest guy in the room” on your chosen tech. Someone else will step into that role. That is a reality. But that doesn’t mean that your tech skills are irrelevant – they are extremely helpful as you develop great answers with your team.
For more on this topic (and some are downloadable resources) check out Episode 6 of Becoming a Geek LeaderHave you ever been in a situation where you’ve been given too little time, a tiny budget, insufficient tools and you’ve managed to turn out something really cool in spite of that?
Has it ever happened that you leveraged your creativity and talent to deliver something amazing and had your customer not even notice? You didn’t even get credit?
I just watched that happen this week. I’ll tell you what happened, and how you can make sure that you get credit (and support for future projects) when you’ve done a great job.
A few months ago I was thrilled to learn that Google had chosen Charlotte as one of the next cities where they will roll out Google fiber. Even though I live outside the city, and there’s zero chance that Google fiber will provide service, I was still excited.
One of the benefits of competition is that it shakes up the marketplace and challenges the status quo. Given the fact that internet service providers in the US are consistently rated the lowest in customer satisfaction, shaking up the status quo is a good thing.
Almost immediately after Google announced that it would be launching a residential 1Gbps service at $75/month, AT&T and Time Warner responded with promises of improved speeds.
Having worked in the telecom industry, one thing that I know about cable and phone companies is that they are VERY technology driven.
There are a large number of very smart geeks working there whose job it is to combine an ever-changing set of technologies into product offerings that support their customer needs. They frequently do it with short deadlines, insufficient funding and little organizational support.
After months of having my Time Warner internet service run without maintenance or attention, I was having some challenges. I restarted my router. I restarted my cable modem, and all was working. A few days later, the problem recurred. At this point I decided it was worth some investigation.
When I signed up for service, the sales people and I went back and forth over “bundles” and “features” and “options” and of course prices. We settled on a 30Mbps download/5Mbps upload service. They offered speeds as high as 50Mbps, but we settled on 30.
When I began to troubleshoot my issues with my cable connection, I ran a speed test and discovered that I was getting almost 120Mbps! I figured something was wrong with their bandwidth throttle, and it would get fixed soon.
A few days later I checked again, and was still getting that kind of speed. I decided to call tech support. I said “I appreciate higher speeds, but I think that your throttling algorithm is not working properly. I don’t want to pay more, so I thought I’d let you know.
The tech told me “Oh yeah. We upgraded everyone in your area. You now get 200Mbps download, 20Mbps upload.”
Here’s the thing. Cable providers are consistently low scoring in customer satisfaction.
In the 2015 ACSI survey, Time Warner Cable had a score of 51 out of 100. (The average company surveyed was around 75.)
In this case, they upgraded my speed – giving me almost 7x the performance AT THE SAME PRICE – but didn’t even tell me about it.
What might happen to their customer satisfaction score if they advertise the fact that they are giving me more and not raising the price?
These geeks did something great. Something that I’m really happy about. something I might have been willing to pay more for. (I did go buy a faster cable modem today because my old one could only deliver 100Mbps, and they have provisioned DOUBLE that.)
Why didn’t they TELL ME ABOUT IT?
At least that’s what Seth Godin said in the book of the same name.
Now I know that “marketing” and “sales” are dirty words when it comes to most geeks. There’s a geek joke that goes “How can you tell when a technology sales person is lying? When their lips are moving.” Too many times geeks have been burned by promises made in the sales process that never materialized in the implementation process.
As a result, we tend to be skeptics and to disregard the “sales-y” stuff we read.
What if the TWC geeks had done something different? They have my physical and email address. They know exactly what equipment I have provisioned at the house. All of that geeky data is in a database they already have.
What if they had taken the time to identify all of the affected customers and send a series of emails like:
Then say it out loud.
Remember Steve Jobs? Back when the iPod launched, all of the competing MP3 players were marketed by storage capacity: 64MB, 128MB, etc.
Steve Jobs came out in his black turtleneck and bluejeans, slid a sleek white and chrome box out of his pocket and said “1,000 songs in your pocket.“
Craft a few messages. Yes, it takes a little time, but if your customers understand and appreciate the cool stuff you’re doing for them, you’ll get the tools, resources, budget and team to do even more great work.
I wish that TWC had thought of this. And I’m enjoying my higher internet speed.
Oh – and to the geeks at TWC who made my faster internet connection possible: THANK YOU!
This morning I sat down with a practice manager of a successful IT professional services firm.
During our discussion she happened to mention that the timesheet system they were using is terribly antiquated.
She needs new timesheet software, right?
Yes, she does, but that is not what she wants to buy. She has a business problem: she can’t get the right information out of her current system to make good business decisions. She can’t use current browsers so she has to spend time trying to figure out how to put data into the current system. This is wasteful.
Does she want to buy software? No she wants a business problem solved. She wants it to be faster to enter information and she wants quality reports to help her make good business decisions.
There is no doubt that the only way she can get what she wants is by hiring smart geeks to write good code to solve those problems.
Your work as a geek is necessary, but not sufficient. You see, customers don’t buy tech. They buy the things that technology will give them.
She is ready to buy something that will give her more time, and give her better information fast.
She has a business problem and a budget to solve that business problem.
If you can solve her problem within her budget, she will be a happy customer.
We all know that some technology platforms are better than others. Some are far better at tackling specific problems than others.
This customer couldn’t care less which platform your technology uses.
Want more resources? Go solve problems. Make customers happy by solving THEIR problems.
You are not in the technology business. You are in the business of solving problems for customers.
Do that, and your customer will be smiling like this:
And here’s the thing: When you start thinking like a business person and solving problems the business people understand they have, your projects will get better budgets.
You will find the support that you need from management.
You will finally have the resources you need to do the great work you want to do.
Go do it!