Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: leadership

  • Flying Office

    I’ve been working as a manager for the vast majority of my career. Teams I led consisted between a couple to 150 people, most of them being bigger than 20. Throughout that time I’ve had my own office once. And I don’t think it’s been a good idea.

    I decided to move to the office as I didn’t really see any reasonable setup that would work with a team spread across 40 rooms. It was then, when I first thought about the idea of sitting with one team for a week or two before moving to another office to join another team. I didn’t decide to pursue the idea though.

    The thing that kept me from doing that was the organizational culture. I was a parachute boss for everyone and the division hadn’t existed before as a single entity, thus there was very little to no trust to me, or between teams.

    If I’d popped one day in a random office stating that I’d been planning to sit in for a couple of weeks it would have been interpreted as spying on the team (or some other, more sophisticated form of repression).

    Fortunately, this time the situation is different. The organizational culture in Lunar Logic is way more open. No one assumes that the boss has bad intentions. In fact, I’ve had first discussions with people being concerned about my actions just a couple of weeks after I joined.

    It takes courage to go to your new boss and interrogate them about their plans and intentions. Such an attitude means that people voluntarily become vulnerable. It also sets up a completely different environment a leader acts in.

    So this time I’m not going to have a private office, not a chance. After just a few weeks spent in a neutral place I fetched myself a flying office. What’s that? A bean bag, a laptop table and a cardboard box.

    Flying office

    A bean bag works extremely well as a sitting device. It is extra-comfortable for short periods of time. On the other hand it would be painful, and unhealthy, to sit there for 8 hours. The latter reminds me that leader’s place isn’t on their butt but on their feet – running around, removing obstacles and solving problems.

    A laptop table solves a problem with keeping a laptop on, well, you lap, which, despite its name, isn’t the most convenient way of working.

    And I use a recycled cardboard box to store all my office belongings, which is simply a handful of sticky notes and a couple of pens and markers.

    This way I can grab my flying office to my hands and move it to the place where I’m needed or I feel like I can be helpful. I need just a bit of space in a corner or by the wall and done – a new office set up.

    Surprisingly, sitting in the corner and almost on the floor has a few unexpected advantages . First, you need very little physical space, which means you will fit to almost any room (unless it is already packed beyond any healthy limits). Second, this way you become almost invisible, which definitely helps if your goal is to understand how the team functions, and not just scratch the surface.

    Third, and arguably most importantly, you strip yourself from status symbols. Instead of a huge desk dubbed by your colleagues as the airstrip, a leather armchair and a locker just the simplest set that does the job.

    All in all, you’re way more accessible and much less intimidating. Isn’t that something every single leader should strive for?

    The flying office isn’t only very mobile; it also renders quite a few barriers that leaders often face irrelevant. Bringing oneself to a floor level is a challenge for ego though, but I’d say it is a good thing too.

    All you need to start it is just a bit of trust.

    Honestly, I regret I didn’t try it, despite the odds, when the only other option was a private office. I can hardly think of a different setup now, that I potentially have half a dozen more common solutions.

    How about you? Given that your team doesn’t work in a single room, are you courageous enough to try?

  • Why Organizational Transformations Fail

    You can’t reorganize the way a business thinks by reorganizing the business.

    ~Stephen Parry

    I can safely state that every company I worked for was attempting to make an organizational transition during my time there. Motivations varied from simply surviving, through adjusting to a new environment, to improving the whole business. Approaches to run a transition also differed, but one common part was a reorganization.

    Oh, reorganizations. Who doesn’t love reorgs? Shaking everyone around. Bringing in good old insecurity and fear of unknown. Quite an interesting strategy to introduce a positive change, although the one which is most prevalent and often inevitable. Unfortunately, a strategy that has a pretty low success rate too.

    After all, coffee doesn’t become sweeter simply because you stir it.

    The interesting part, however, is that I can come up with an example or two in which reorganizations helped to make a transition a success, or even make it possible in the first place.

    How come? The answer is hidden in Stephen Parry’s words at the beginning of the post. It’s not about the reorganization itself; it’s about changing the way business thinks. The problem with most reorgs is that they’re driven from the top, which usually means that the top of hierarchy remains the same. It also means that the way business thinks, which spreads top-down, remains unchanged.

    If the organization’s leaders’ mindset remains the same, any change that is introduced down there isn’t sustainable. Eventually, it will be reverted. Depending on how many layers of isolation there are it may take some time but it’s inevitable. Prevailing mindset just goes top-down and unless you can address its source it’s a battle you’re not going to win.

    I can think of, and have been a part of, reorganizations that shook the very top of a company, introducing new leaders and thus enabling the new way of thinking. Yes, the business was reorganized but this was neither the only nor the most important part of the change.

    Because coffee doesn’t become sweeter simply because you stir it. Unless you’ve remembered to add sugar before, that is.

    The game-changer here is mindset; that has to change in order to enable the successful transition. And I have bad news for you: it has to change at the very top of the organization. You don’t necessarily have to start there, but eventually it either happens or things, in general, remain the same.

    So if you consider a reorg as a way to change how your business works, ask yourself a question: does this change affect the mindset of the organization’s leaders? If not, I wouldn’t expect much chance of success.

    Besides, there are many ways to skin a cat. A reorg isn’t the only tool you have to change mindset across the organization. Heck, it isn’t even a very good one. Remember that when you start the next revolution just to see that virtually nothing changes as a result.

    By the way, there is a neat application of this idea in a bit different situation too. If you want to preserve mindset across the organization when changing leaders, pay very close attention how new leaders think. Your company can be a well-oiled machine, but when steering wheel is grabbed by a guy who neither understands nor cares about the existing mindset, the situation is going to deteriorate pretty quickly. You just don’t want to hire Steve Balmer to substitute for Bill Gates.

  • Leadership, Fellowship, Citizenship

    There was a point in my career when I realized how different the concepts of management and leadership were, and that to be a good manager one had to be a good leader. Since then the idea of leadership, as I understand it, has worked for me very well. I even like to consider my role in organizations I work for as a leader, not a manager.

    Perceptions of leadership shift these days. Bob Marshall proposes the concept of fellowship. The idea is based on the famous Fellowship of the Ring and builds on how the group operated and what values were shared among its members, so that they eventually could achieve their goal.

    A common denominator here is that everyone is equal; there’s no single “leader” who is superior to everyone else. At different points in time different people take over the role of leader in a way that is the best for the group.

    As Bob points, leadership doesn’t really help to move beyond an analytical organization (see: The Marshall Model). This means the concept of leadership is insufficient to deal with further challenges our companies face on a road of continuous improvement. We need something different to deal with our teams, thus fellowship.

    Another, somehow related, concept comes from Tobias Mayer, who points us to the idea of citizenship. Tobias builds the concept on a balance between rights and responsibilities. It’s not that we, as citizens, are forced or told to keep our neighborhood clean – it’s that we feel responsible for it. This mechanism can be transferred to our workplaces and it would be an improvement, right?

    I like both concepts. Actually, I even see how one can transit to the other, back and forth, depending on which level of an organization you are. On a team level, fellowship neatly describes desired behaviors and group dynamics. As you go up the ladder, citizenship is a nice model to describe representation of a group among higher ranks. It also is a great way to show that we should be responsible for and to the people we work with, e.g. different teams, and the organization as a whole.

    Using ideas introduced by Tobias and Bob we can improve how our teams and organizations operate, that’s for sure.

    Yet, I don’t get one thing here. Why fellowship and citizenship concepts are built in opposition to leadership?

    OK, maybe my understanding of leadership is flawed and there is The Ultimate Leadership Definition written in the stone somewhere, only I don’t know it. Maybe fellowship and citizenship violate one of The Holy Rules of Leadership and I’m just not aware of them. Because, for me, both ideas are perfectly aligned with leadership.

    Leadership is about making a team operate better. If it takes to be in the first line, fine. When someone needs to do the dirty work no one else is willing to do, I’m good with that as well. I’m even happier when others can take over the leader’s role whenever it does make sense. And what about taking responsibility for what we do, people around and an organization around? Well, count me in, no matter what hat I wear at the moment.

    When I read Bob and Tobias I’m all: “hell, yeah!” Except the part with labels. Because I still call it leadership. This is exactly what leadership is for me. Personally, I don’t need another name for what I do.

    I don’t say that we should avoid coining new terms. Actually, both citizenship and fellowship are very neat names. I just don’t see the point of building the opposition to ideas we already know. The more so as citizenship and fellowship are models, which are useful for many leaders.

    I don’t buy an argument that we need a completely new idea as people are misusing concepts we already have. Well, of course they are. There are all kinds of flawed flavors of leadership, same as there will be flawed flavors of fellowship and citizenship when they become popular.

    I don’t agree that leadership encourages wrong behaviors, e.g. learned helplessness. Conversely, the role of a leader is to help a team operate better, thus help eliminate such behaviors. A good leader doesn’t build followership; they build new leaders.

    That’s why I prefer to treat citizenship and fellowship as enhancements of leadership, not substitutions of it.

  • Being a Leader

    Recently a subject of leadership pops up on Software Project Management pretty often, but usually I look at it from manager’s perspective. After all that’s something I do for living – managing teams. So yes, being a leader is the first and probably the most important role of manager (by the way, the post on role of manager turned into full-blown presentation which causes some buzz every time I deliver it). But leadership isn’t exclusively attached to management.

    We are leaders in our workplaces, but we lead in different communities and informal groups as well. And even if we stick to our professional lives we can lead in technical areas or be typical people leaders. Leadership has many names. This was exactly the theme of my recent presentation on the subject which I delivered as a guest on Toastmasters contest.

    Being a leader

    A very interesting discussion followed the session. I used leadership definition I’ve heard from Mary Poppendieck: “Ability to attract followers is exactly what makes you a leader.” The definition neatly covers all sorts of tech leads – if I believe you’re knowledgeable and experienced person in a specific area I will come to pester you every time I need help with that matter. In other words I will follow you, which according to definition makes you a leader.

    The argument against that approach is that we call it authority and not leadership and leadership is/should be discussed from a perspective of leading teams/groups. I can’t say I agree with this point of view as we’d have to cross out many leaders who build their follower base thanks to extraordinary knowledge and technical skills. What do you think?

    By the way, after criticism I faced on my slides from AgileEE I built this slide deck differently. Happy now?

  • So You Promoted Wrong People to Management, What Now?

    It seems recently I’m telling you a lot stuff about people management and managers in general. If describing the role of manager wasn’t enough you could also read a rant about screwed promotions which we see so often. This all stuff is good (yes, such a shameless self-promotion), but it assumes one optimistic thing: you can still make decisions who will be promoted to management.

    However sometimes we don’t choose who is promoted to managerial positions. These decisions have already been made and they’ve been made wrong. If your task is to deal with that you’ll need to follow a three-step scenario.

    1. Coach

    OK, great engineer doesn’t make a candidate for a great manager. But it doesn’t make you can’t make a good manager out of great engineer. The trick is to raise awareness that someone doesn’t perform well as a manager and coach them to improve their people skills. Help them to change their focus from engineering to people management. However this effort can’t be unlimited. If someone isn’t willing to change you won’t force them. Then it’s time to move to the point number 2.

    2. Find a better place

    If someone excelled as an engineer and you can’t make a good manager out of them you might try to move them back to some engineering-related role. Maybe design, maybe architecture, maybe even project management would be a good place. It all depends on an individual case. Of course it is tricky – what you basically do is you move someone back from management to engineering, so you better have pretty prestigious engineering roles. And do it if, and only if, you believe the person would perform well in a new role. If you can’t find such role or leaving management isn’t really an option all you’re left with is a solution number 3.

    3. Let them go

    If you can deal with an issue other way you should let wrong people go. And yes, this means you’re losing a great engineer, who unfortunately became poor manager and is unwilling to switch back to the role which he performed well at. What you’re left with at that point is either to keep someone who do crappy job, which also affects their team, or to let them go and find possibly a better candidate. Well, if we discuss someone who failed at points 1 and 2 of the plan I’d let him go. As harsh as it sounds it is a good decision for both of you and for the discussed team.

    Keeping poor managers is much worse than admitting you’ve made wrong decision promoting them in the first place.

    And if you want to see more stuff about being a good manager you will appreciate my recent presentation titled Good Manager, True Leader, which I delivered at our internal company conference.

    Good Manager, True Leader

  • Specifics of Voluntary Projects

    Recently I told you about TEDxKrakow and how great idea it is to get engaged in a project like that if you want to get some experience in project management.

    No one commented that voluntary projects can’t be exactly the same as typical commercial projects even though I pretty much expected to hear this kind of argument. I did because it would be well-grounded. Voluntary projects are specific because, well, they are voluntary.

    OK, so where are differences?

    • No managers. No one is a boss. No one can just tell others they have to do something. There is no easy path. You have to earn your power before you can use it. People won’t start listening to you just because you are able to talk loudly. You have to show that you are doing at least as much by yourself and/or earn their trust before you start shouting your orders all over the place.
    • More talking. Talking is easy, talking is cheap. Unfortunately talking doesn’t get things done. People tend to throw great ideas as long as someone else is supposed to make them real. Unfortunately it sometimes turns into much talking and little doing as there isn’t really a business client who would make quick decisions on what is must-have and what is nice-to-have. A pretty good playground for doers I’d say.
    • More freedom. Unlike in typical projects you actually choose what you’re going to do. It’s like the open auction – I have this and that tasks unassigned, who’s going to take them over? Specialization works pretty similar though – we tend to choose things we are competent at and avoid those we suck at.
    • It’s easier to shine. In voluntary projects no one wants to get all the credit. After all it isn’t a place where people are going to build their whole careers. Chances are good that your effort will be properly credited. Just choose your tasks wisely and then deliver what you promised to deliver. Since in voluntary projects over-promising is just as common as in all others it should be enough to make you stand out.

    There is one more thing. It is real fun to be a part of this kind of project. But, after all, I’m not sure if it is a general rule or TEDxKrakow I used as example is fun to work on or fantastic people I met in this venture made it so. Or maybe all above are true.

    And if you haven’t yet registered to this fine event do it while you still can.

  • The Role of Manager

    I took part in a very interesting discussion today. We were talking about criteria we should use to appraise leaders and managers in the organization. The most surprising part, at least for me, was discussion about notion of line manager among disputants.

    It came out that we considered average functional manager as anything between pure-manager to person who does 90% of engineering work mixed with 10% of managerial tasks. That’s a variety of options, isn’t it? As you may guess I supported rather the former than the latter.

    Well, if I’m such an opponent of letting people do what they used to do before they were promoted to management, likely coding if we talk about software teams, what I think they should do all day long? In other words what is, or should be, the role of manager.

    Leader

    This vague term describes first and most important trait most managers should have and only few have. If I’m a team member I expect my manager will show leadership and charisma. I want to be ignited to follow his ideas. I need to be sure he knows why and where we are heading. I have to see him around when problems arise. I eager to be managed by someone I’d like to follow even if no one told me so. A good manager is also a good leader but these two are not the same. What a pity it isn’t common mixture.

    Coach

    Help newcomers with learning the organization. Help inexperienced with gaining experience. Help everyone with growing. Help those with problems with fixing them. Easy? No, not at all. First, you need to know who needs what. Then, you need to know how to reach people so your helping hand won’t be rejected. Finally, you need to work carefully and patiently sharing your knowledge in experience in a way which doesn’t frustrate or dishearten people. Repeat when finished.

    Shield

    As a line manager you have some senior management over your head. This is a bad news. Actually there’s usually a lot of crap flying over there and, because of the gravity, it’s going to land down on heads of your team. There will be blame games. There will be pointing fingers. It is your time. Be a shield. Take enough bullets on your chest for the team. You’ll earn respect. You’ll earn a bunch of loyal followers. And that’s how you earn your spurs.

    Advocate

    As a manager you’re also an advocate. Devil’s advocate to be precise. You have to present and defend different decisions made up there, in the place where only C-level execs are allowed. Sometimes these decisions you won’t like. But for your people you’re still the face of the company so don’t play the angry boy and act like a man. We don’t always do what we want. After all, they pay you for this, remember?

    Motivator

    Sometimes everyone needs a kick in the butt to get back to work at full speed. It would be quite a pleasant task but unfortunately kicking butts is used as a metaphor here. It’s all about motivation. And I have a bad news here, there’s no easy answer for a question what motivates people. You have to learn each of your people individually. Oh, forgot to mention, it takes quite a lot of time to learn what drives all these people.

    Adviser

    Yes, an adviser. Not a decision-maker. At least not unless you really have to make a decision by yourself. People will come to you asking different things. Well, they will if they think your opinion may add some value and you’re capable to understand what the hell they are talking about. Of course you can guess or shoot or use magic 8 ball but you better learn (oh no! more learning) what the problem really is and help your team to solve it. Note: it is different than solving it for them, even if you know the answer. If an association which comes to your mind is delegation I must praise your reasoning.

    Now if you are done with those and still have enough time to keep up your outstanding engineering skills, please do Mr. Anderson. Unfortunately chances are good it is enough to fill more than a full working day so you’d have to choose between focusing on your management or technical skills.

    And if you happen to spend two third of your day coding, well, I dare to say you aren’t a manager I’d like to work for. Your people would say the same, but you don’t talk with them so you don’t even know. After all there’s no time to chit chat, you have to code, right?

  • Don’t Promote Best Engineers to Management Positions

    I remember one of first post ideas for this blog back then, 4 years ago. It was about choosing people to promote them to management roles. I’ve never published the post and I’m glad about that. A few years ago I didn’t know about hiring and promoting managers more than typical decision maker in IT companies now.

    I knew nothing.

    During these few years I’ve met a number of managers who should never be promoted to any position which touches leading people whatsoever. I mean they were great engineers once. But engineering, and software development isn’t an exception, and management are two different things. They don’t even rhyme with each other. So why the hell do we keep promoting our best engineers to management positions?

    Vast majority of best developers I’ve met were crappy candidates for managers. They were thinking in terms of code, not in terms of people. And a manager isn’t the go-to-guy when you have a technical problem. (The guy is called Google by the way.) A manager should work with people, not with code, architecture or build server. Yes, the transition is possible. Hey, if someone is willing to pay me real money for managing people it is some kind of proof. But the switch is painful and time consuming. And unfortunately most of the time it just doesn’t happen.

    We end up with a lot of people around who are still good-to-great engineers but crappy managers. And we let them lead. Then, when we need to promote someone even higher we have basically no good choice. And we end up with a bunch of managers-by-accident all over the organization. As a side effect you lose your best brains when it comes to engineering.

    Skills required to be technical leader and people manager are so different it is highly unlikely that your best engineer is also your best candidate for a manager. You can safely assume your engineers aren’t different. Why should they?

    If you want to offer your best engineer management position, rethink it. Twice. Is it possible you do it because it is exactly how things were done around for years? Is it possible you’re going to lose great developer and gain crappy manager instead? Is it possible to find a better candidate within the team or outside?

    If the answer is triple yes, and surprisingly often it is so, you’re doing wrong thing. I would even say that sometimes it’s better to let your great engineer go than to make him a manager. Of course if he is a crappy candidate for management position.

  • You Can Manage Your Boss

    I often hear this excuse: “I don’t have power to change this.” Hell, I use it by myself way too often. It is a convenient excuse. Since you aren’t in position to do something the easy way you take a step back and do nothing.

    And this is wrong.

    Let’s take a typical situation: your boss sucks. If I got 10 bucks every time I heard that someone’s boss sucks I would be crazy rich. But let’s face it, I have poor opinion about managers in general and I think most managers suck anyway so I’m going to agree willingly.

    So what do you do when your manager sucks? Wait, let me guess… You do nothing. Hey, you don’t have the power, do you? You just can’t change the situation so it’s better just to accept it, right?

    Wrong.

    People are simple beasts. We all have our goals, private agendas, drivers and motivators. We also have tools which helps us to achieve these goals. Some of us have power. (And yes, I’m lucky enough I have power long enough to get used to it.) Some of us have skills. And some of us have instinct or cleverness.

    It’s not always the guy with power who wins. Actually if that was so, most of companies would work perfectly well, since every reasonable rule would be enforced and widely accepted. But somehow we see organizations which are completely sick and filled with frustration even though their leaders have mouths full of wise advices.

    It’s just they’re losing the battle with those who don’t have power but are more knowledgeable and smart.

    The trick is, to some point, you can manage everyone around. It doesn’t matter if he is your subordinate, your colleague or your boss. You can. Yes, you can. Yes, you… If I know what is important for you, what drives you and how you act in different situations I can trick you or I can build incentives for you to act like I want. Even if I’m your subordinate.

    A couple of examples. Megan had a boss who was pretty much frustrated with surrounding situation. Things were going bad. But he, as a manager, was supposed to play devils’ advocate. Megan, who knew the boss for quite a long time, felt that frustration hidden behind the mask of official optimism and decided to break it talking with the boss privately. She could do nothing, since she had no power to change boss’ attitude and then a new cool business wouldn’t emerge when they both left the company to start it.

    John had a manager who loved bells and whistles. He knew most of project decisions were made basing on what the manager personally likes, not on reasonable business analysis. When recession came and every team looked for projects John brought a bunch of cool, but basically useless, ideas to the manager. John expected the manager would personally like a couple of them and he was right. The team got the budget for these projects. Business-wise projects were useless but John played his agenda and got what he wanted.

    We all base on a lot of assumptions. Especially managers. We just can’t know every fact so we do what our gut feelings say. And finally we are biased. This means we make our decisions basing on a set of arguments which is far from being complete or even reasonable. That’s why it is not the power which is the most important since almost every power bearer can be blinded easily.

    So don’t give me excuses you just can’t change anything since you have no power. At least try. Then try again. Unless you fail a couple of times I don’t believe you can’t do it.

  • Technical Leadership and People Management

    The other day I had a discussion about leadership and management. When we came to an argument that there’s no chance to advance to a position where you can facilitate leadership and management skills in discussed organization several people (from present and from past) automatically came to my mind. They all have the same problem which they may overlook.

    They all are (or were) great engineers. People you’d love to have on your team. But at some point of their careers they started to think about having their own teams, managing their own people. Hey, that’s natural career path for great engineers, isn’t it?

    Well, actually it is not.

    Do a simple exercise. Think who you consider as a great engineer, no matter if he’s a star book author or your colleague no one outside your company knows about. Now what do they do to pay the rent? I guess they are (surprise, surprise) engineers, tech leads, freelancers, independent consultants or entrepreneurs. I guess there are none who would be called a manager in the first place, even when they happen to do some managerial work from time to time.

    Why? Because these two paths are mutually exclusive. You can’t keep your technical expertise on respected level in the meantime, between performance review of your team member and 3-hour status meeting with your manager. You either keep your hands busy with writing code or you get disconnected with other developers out there.

    On the other hand what makes you a great engineer usually makes you a poor manager at the same time. If you spend all day long coding, you don’t have enough time for people in your team. And they do need your attention. They do much more often than you’d think. If you’re going to be a decent manager big part of your time will be reserved on managerial tasks. There won’t be enough time left to keep on technical track. Sorry.

    That’s why all these people who I thought of have to (or had to) make a decision which way they are (were) going to choose. Technical leadership path means most of the time you won’t have people to manage but you may be respected as an architect, designer, senior engineer. If you’re lucky enough you can even get one of these fancy business cards with title of Chief Scientist or Chief Guru or maybe just a simple Co-Owner.

    Managerial path on the other hand will make you feel lame during basically every technical discussion out there but yes, you will have people to manage. If you’re lucky, and I mean lucky, not competent, you’ll become VP or something.

    You have to choose. Or you had to some time ago. What’s your choice? What do you regret about it?