As I started my journey from an individual contributor to becoming a manager to an engineering leader. I quickly realized, what makes a great engineer is not equal to a great engineering leader. As an engineer I shied away from visibility - I was happy coding in my cubicle and seeing things I code come to life and deployed.
My early days as an engineering manager was bumpy, since being a manager means understanding people better. And nothing in my undergraduate or graduate studies ever taught me how to decipher human being or how to make an effective team. The imposter syndrome set in soon! During initial days it made me question - who do I really want to become. Continue as an individual contributor or embrace the engineering manager to a leader path?
Upon deeper reflection, I realized, I like nurturing talent, supporting bright engineers become even more awesome. So I embraced my new responsibilities with enthusiasm. As always books, YouTube, Coursera was my friend. I like structured learning more than nibbling online contents here and there. So I enrolled in coursera courses, mostly audited few I paid for. I started deconstructing human psychology, team building, systems thinking. It all paid off.
The way I measured my success was through a series of questionnaire every six month given to my team members. And this realization comes from Author Adam Grant and the Michigan University Course of seeking feedback/criticism from your immediate interaction. It took me time to build trust with my team members, and this continuous feedback system helped me understand how do I improve myself to help the team be better over time.
Following courses on coursera helped me shape my thinking towards how can I be an effective leader to help my team succeed.
On Strategy : What Managers Can Learn from Philosophy - PART 1 (Note I like reading Philosophy and hence this course I truly enjoyed learning parallels between philosophy and management)
Inspiring and Motivating Individuals - This helped me understand human psychology better around motivation, inspiration, fairness and hence helped me see by making my team members successful, I will succeed.
Following Books were instrumental in shaping my leadership style:
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
Following Podcast helped me study other successful organizations, deploying similar technology I am interested in working with. It is like learning through their mistakes, what not to do and straight away get to the best practices avoiding blunders during initial uncertain days of adoption of the new technology.
Focus on Quality, Automation of Processes.
Quality Assurance Team != Quality - They are the final gate keeper and software Test Automation Engineers not manual testers.
Engineers producing code are responsible for quality and not the QA Team!
Recover quickly from failures.
Blue/Green deployment strategy and infrastructure changes helped restore order for customer quickly and at the same time providing the much needed quite time for crisis resolution.
Radical Transparency and Honesty with my team and extended cross functional teams.
Usually transparency helped me cut through office politics easier.
KanBan Agile Methodology - I like KanBan since it manages work instead of people. And the transparency of the KanBan board forces individuals to self manage.
Daily Standup
Monthly Team Retrospective for process improvement
Capture all items making team unproductive, select as a team one process improvement item to work on, finish the one item picked for improvement.
reflect - choose - improve - act - repeat
Every six month do a self reflection exercise with the team member to check the pulse for career satisfaction and team engagement.
Following YouTube content shaped my leadership style early on in my career.
This demonstrated the perception of fairness and hence made me aware of as a Engineering Leader, at all times, I must keep an eye on being fair to my team members. Organization's success depends on the happiness of its team member. And I was given the opportunity and privilege to ensure to keep team morale and engagement high.
I was introduced to this experiment by the Coursera course on Motivating and Inspiring Individuals
This movie was a home work for our Creativity and Innovation class(By Prof. McKenzie) during my MBA at UCSD. But was the best lesson for me to take to my team and help effective group collaboration.
It was part of getting a better understanding how to collaborate effectively as a group. This movie had a profound impact on my approach to group collaboration amongst team member. Since his class, I have shown this movie to my team. Yes, I rented it on Amazon Prime and watched as a team. How to avoid confirmation bias, how to objectively see individual biases against the facts on the table, etc. It was the basic ingredient for my team to work together effectively.