How'd I get here? This started as a personal goal of self-improvement through self-reflection and vulnerability. I decided to try that in the context of my own leadership while sprinkling in some Github learning.
Read on to better understand my thoughts on leadership, the outcome of my leadership self-reflection, and some expectation setting on both sides of a leader/team relationship. Or don't and let's grab a beer.
Cue vulnerability....
When people ask me about my leadership "style," I start to get a little anxious because I can't describe my leaderhsip as a style (i.e. I'm not going to tell you I'm a servant leader, a transformational leader, etc.). Rather than going there, I'd like to share what I believe to be the role of a leader and what shapes Todd Parson as a human being. This isn't intended to document away good conversation and growing a relationship in-person but hopefully it can help you more quickly understand what's behind the curtain.
- Having an impact
- impact = ["Helping people grow as humans, engineers, and teammates", "Affecting positive change in my team, department, organization", "Doing good things the right way", "Delivering meaninful value"]
- Change
- change = ["Constantly seeking changes in people, process, technology to keep me engaged (or I'll get bored)", "Helping others embrace change", "Affecting change, especially where change is hard"]
- Learning
- learning = ["Understanding humans and this complex organ called the brain", "Learning through others about a problem or technology", "Getting to the root cause of X where X = technical problem, a team collaboration issue, what's actually holding you back on something"]
- People!
- Help people be better and do better by faI cilitating self-reflection and helping them identify growth areas in people, process improvement, and technical skills.
- In a high-performing engineering team, this usually results in challenging engineers to focus their development on the people domain, e.g. communication, influence, and leadership.
- Help people be better and do better by faI cilitating self-reflection and helping them identify growth areas in people, process improvement, and technical skills.
- Cultivate a culture of action and value delivery
- Build an environment that enables engineers to quickly respond to customer needs with intuition and action to deliver value.
- Visionary
- Think two steps ahead, be transparent with your team and stakeholders about what you see in that crystal ball, and listen to the reactions.
- Direction
- Translate your vision to action, inspire the team, and empower them to execute.
- Traffic cop
- Maybe a bit of a nuance in how I see the role of a leader but I strive to shield my team from the crap work that provides little value while ensuring the biggest opportunities to provide value (and most engaging, complex problems) are theirs to own. Kind of like a traffic cop on one of those airport moving walkways - divert the people with the big bags on a long layover away from the walkway and get the people with the right bags that need to get somewhere quickly on the moving walkway.
- Oh and at the end of the walkway, make sure there's recognition the team helped get them where they needed to be.
- Maybe a bit of a nuance in how I see the role of a leader but I strive to shield my team from the crap work that provides little value while ensuring the biggest opportunities to provide value (and most engaging, complex problems) are theirs to own. Kind of like a traffic cop on one of those airport moving walkways - divert the people with the big bags on a long layover away from the walkway and get the people with the right bags that need to get somewhere quickly on the moving walkway.
- Run your business
- Like running a business, there are some management activities required to ensure long-term success, like human capital planning, budgeting, vendor and asset management, and succession planning.
- (Blurry) Vision
- I wouldn't describe myself as a visionary but as I better understand higher-level strategic direction and identify opportunities to deliver value, I will describe for you where I think we can be down the road. Sometimes "down the road" is only a few months ahead because our problem domain is chaotic at the moment, other times it might be years down the road with where I think our customers' needs might be going.
- I'll help break down that vision in to achievable objectives but I expect you to define how to accomplish those objectives.
- I expect you to be personally responsible for thoroughly understanding our vision, our organization's direction, and the corporate strategy.
- I will proactively share opportunities to learn more about these strategies and if you tell me you're not completely following, I will do my best to close the understanding gap.
- Getting you out of your comfort zone!
- From a personal development perspective, this is my #1 objective. I will never let you settle and will constantly challenge you to get out of your comfort zone.
- Good at Powershell? Use Python next time.
- Proficient at the technologies used for this problem? Raise the bar (i.e. novice --> intermediate).
- Strong technical skills and aptitude? Set technical development aside and put all development efforts in to soft skills (e.g. written communications, influencing others, etc.).
- From a personal development perspective, this is my #1 objective. I will never let you settle and will constantly challenge you to get out of your comfort zone.
- Eye on your derailers
- Teams and individuals typically have some blinders or derailers that if unaddressed, could send us down a never-ending rabbit hole and impact the value we're able to deliver. I'm here to bring that blinder to the forefront.
- For example, I've observed a tendency for engineers to continually pull back the layers of the onion on a complex problem until the problem is solved to perfection. In these scenarios, I will ask "Is this good enough?" along the way or before the next iteration I might ask "What if we spent the time needed to peel the next layer of the onion on a different complex problem?"
- When this becomes a regular thing with the team, I'll push for an "MVP" approach to all the problems, suggest changes to the "Definition of Done", etc.
- At some point, there are diminishing levels of value or innovation return on additional effort. I'm here to help find the sweet spot for that effort investment/value return.
- Teams and individuals typically have some blinders or derailers that if unaddressed, could send us down a never-ending rabbit hole and impact the value we're able to deliver. I'm here to bring that blinder to the forefront.
- Curiosity
- I love learning and solving problems.
- I lean on you to help me learn and develop so if I'm asking questions and really digging in to something, understand it's so I can learn through you and I'm not questioning your solution, approach, etc.
- Authenticity
- I'm an open book, ask me anything.
- I strive for open, honest relationships with everyone.
- Transparency
- Feedback, good and bad.
- I need a trusted, technical partner.
- Due to a lack of personal technical depth, I depend on technical engineers to contribute to our direction, challenge assertions, and help me understand what I'm missing. This could be a team of engineers and/or a "partner in crime" trusted advisor.
- You are responsible for:
- Understanding strategy and direction.
- Letting me know when you don't understand our strategy/direction.
- Your own personal growth and development.
- Letting me know when you need help, resources, etc. for your development.
- Understanding strategy and direction.
- Hold your teammate accountable.
- 1:1s are your time - you drive the conversation.
- Your own self-reflection, at least at quarterly check-in time, to identify strengths and weaknesses.
- Feedback for me and your teammates.
- No problem is someone else's problem.
- If you want to discuss problems, something you're struggling with, roadblocks you're running in to, etc. I'm all for it. BUT I expect you to be a part of the solution(ing).
- Extra credit - Taking the initiative to work through those challenges and get it fixed, especially when others can get value from it (see developer productivity bias below).
- Regardless, don't dump and run!
- If you want to discuss problems, something you're struggling with, roadblocks you're running in to, etc. I'm all for it. BUT I expect you to be a part of the solution(ing).
- Passion for learning and problem solving.
I like to think I'm pretty self-aware about my strengths, weaknesses, tendencies and oddities. But I also know there's plenty I'm not seeing, so please give me feedback and help me get better! Here are some random thoughts about some of my personal observations.
- Lists for everything - organizing thoughts, TO DOs and reminders.
- Taking it a step further, I find myself breaking big ideas down and just general mental processing in to ordered lists.
- Notes FTW
- Overlapping with my list tendencies, if I need to remember something, I HAVE to write it down. Not always for future reference but for committing it to this knowledge repo in my head.
- So I may jot down notes while we have our touch-bases. Trust that I'm not multi-tasking and that I'm just getting it inserted in to brain.
- Overlapping with my list tendencies, if I need to remember something, I HAVE to write it down. Not always for future reference but for committing it to this knowledge repo in my head.
- Developer productivity bias
- While I've never been in a formal software engineer role, I've developed an appreciation for developer productivity and am motivated (passionate?) to make software developers' lives better. IMO, software engineers are the ones delivering business value and I don't think that's appreciated enough.
- This could also be related to providing a software developer productivity service inside of an infrastructure organization where I felt an obligation to advocate for optimizing for software delivery vs. infrastructure cost efficiency.
- While I've never been in a formal software engineer role, I've developed an appreciation for developer productivity and am motivated (passionate?) to make software developers' lives better. IMO, software engineers are the ones delivering business value and I don't think that's appreciated enough.
- Logical thinker
- I have a bias towards logical reasoning and don't always trust my intuition. Getting more exposure to more problem domains is helping me better trust my intuition but I'm still more comfortable when I can get as much context, data, etc. as possible.
- Related, if you give me some supporting evidence (data!) and make a rational case, I can typically get behind most solutions but because I don't always trust my intuition, I may struggle to challenge you in unfamiliar domains.
- Being vulnerable
- I'm working on being more open and vulnerable in an effort to make Work Todd and Outside-of-Work Todd one in the same.
- Be grateful but never satisfied.
- Leadership is about helping people find their intersection of passion, talent, and value.
- No problem is someone else's problem.
- Think big, start small, go fast.