How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
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How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
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Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#2Curious if anyone here has seen success with the first step, "Get Approval From Leadership". I tend to favor "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Nobody is more resistant to change than middle management, so I tend to jump straight to small-scale adoption and coalition building.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#3Curious if anyone here has seen success with the first step, "Get Approval From Leadership". I tend to favor "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Nobody is more resistant to change than middle management, so I tend to jump straight to small-scale adoption and coalition building.
agreed!
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#4Curious if anyone here has seen success with the first step, "Get Approval From Leadership". I tend to favor "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Nobody is more resistant to change than middle management, so I tend to jump straight to small-scale adoption and coalition building.
Depends on how they're defining leadership in TFA, as it is vaguely written such that it could mean managers or it could mean technical-leaders, e.g. a team lead / tech lead type.
If I have an idea that I know is correct / am sure of, I would broach it with the concerned folks. If I couldn't get them onboard, and was still sure I was right, I would discuss it with the senior engineers to get the feedback. If, at that point, I was still sure the idea was right I would try to once again try to convince the team of the merits, with the available appeal to authority.
At that point you either win, give up, or try to convince management to enforce the idea.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#5> You can't gain the trust and respect of the entire team at once. You must start in a small area of your team and work outwards. It's best to begin with yourself. After all, how can you convince others to adopt your tool if you don't use it yourself?
This is great if your proposed change is a workflow tool, but if it requires any code changes whatsoever (eg a new framework), the code review process reintroduces those strong opinions and you're back at square one, no matter how small the change.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#6> You can't gain the trust and respect of the entire team at once. You must start in a small area of your team and work outwards. It's best to begin with yourself. After all, how can you convince others to adopt your tool if you don't use it yourself? This is great if your proposed change is a workflow tool, but if it requires any code changes whatsoever (eg a new framework), the code review process reintroduces thos…
If, in the language of the article, you can crowdfund leadership capital from a few of them, you will have a much larger amount of spendable LC.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#7Totally missing from the article is any notion that the tool or thing you're trying to push might not actually be a great idea. The assumption seems to be that the author was Right (TM) and all that remained to address was the challenge of getting others to see the one true path.
If you're trying to convince others to make a change, and they're pushing back, listen to those concerns and revisit whether or not the change you're advocating makes sense. Maybe it does and they will come to see that, but you should also be open to considering their points of view and might change your opinion once you do. It's a two-way thing.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#8I feel like personal credibility is the only real way to get teammates to follow your lead. And that involves things like following your teammates lead as well.
Collaboration is an art form.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#9The goal should not be to have people follow your lead. The goal should be: get your team to follow good ideas, and not follow bad ideas. No matter who proposed them.
Smart people often have good ideas, but they can have bad ideas as well and a team needs to be prepared to reject them.
Likewise, the lowest ranking person in the organization can have a trillion dollar idea and your organization should be prepared to profit from it.
Then, no consensus building approach has a bulletproof guarantee that a consensus will happen.
Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead
#10Certainly agree with most of this. It has a couple of underlying ideas that I've also noticed.
1. Use empathy to both overcome resistance and do the right thing. The strategy in Step 2 for reframing an interaction in a way that gets the person to understand that you're trying to help them, and also reminds you to remove your ego and that the goal is to improve things for everyone, is one I've used a lot. Not because people think you're trying to be difficult but because it overcomes defensive barriers and helps ease them into the context switch of thinking about the problem.
2. Get a foothold with iterative progress. The author did this by splitting adoption and (the process for) configuration. Especially with tools and processes, people will often try to jump to the final state and if they can find any holes or issues with the proposal as is they'll be inclined to throw it all out at the start. If you instead make it clear that we're a) trying something new that will b) be improved as we learn more about it and c) can always be reversed if we decide it was a bad idea, people are usually much more open to it.
One thing the article mentions though is "spending" leadership capital. I like instead to think of it as "investing" capital. If the decision you invested it in ends up being bad, you lose it. If it ends up making people's lives better, you've gained more. Thinking about it this way also can get junior people, as mentioned in the article, to be more inclined to help with decision making. They don't have a lot of capital to spend but they can choose to invest the little capital they have in order to grow it.