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An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#11
Title is a bit bs

Their is a difference between ownership of a project and leadership. When they asked senior developers with experience to lead they had the vision granted by experience to do so. When they asked the juniors to lead they lead the project into trouble as they don't have the experience to see problems and judge risk well.

The success came from giving every one ownership, a stake in the project and work. But when making every one the lead they ran into the too many cooks spoil the broth problem, the solution was to give the juniors the same responsibility (ownership) but more leadership in how to achieve.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#12
This is the type of article that new engineering managers should bookmark and re-read every few months. Is the advice perfect? No, but it will probably bring some new perspective to some problems you'll have along the way. There is no one size fits all management strategy that works in every situation, but every manager should be aware of the common pitfalls on the growth path of engineering managers.

In my personal experience as an engineering manager and in mentoring new engineering managers, this is the tipping point where managers either succeed or spiral into burnout:

> I found myself and our product manager becoming the bottleneck in planning out who will work on what project, next, and who will be the lead.

If you find yourself bottlenecking the team, you're either micromanaging or your team has grown too large for a single level of management. You need to take the time to develop a new system that removes you as the bottleneck. Don't try to push through the issue by putting in more hours. That's not sustainable. Find a new system.

The "everyone is a leader" strategy described in this article is a good perspective on what every manager should be doing: Clearly defining ownership boundaries and expectations, while avoiding micromanagement. It's a common mistake to assume that because the manager is responsible for the success and failure of a project, the manager should also micromanage the critical decision making. That's the first trait that needs to be trained out of almost every engineer promoted to manager in my experience.

Some engineers instinctively reject anything that feels like a management responsibility. Others will demand promotions or raises for taking on basic ownership tasks. Often, these engineers started their careers in toxic environments where accountability was synonymous with "you're going to be fired if this fails". It's important to show these engineers that your environment really is safe, and that good things come from taking ownership. You have to back up your words with your actions, of course. IME, most engineers truly enjoy autonomy, ownership, and leadership once they can reasonably expect that it won't be used against them.

And of course, it's important to screen for these traits during the hiring process. It's also important to filter out engineers who can't or won't learn to take ownership of their work.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#13

After thirty years in this industry, I've learned that in a good environment, almost any process or team organization will work, but in a bad environment, nothing will help. :/

Very true. In the end it comes down to respect, trust and honesty with each other. For some reason organizations always want to build a layer of processes on top of a rotten foundation.

A simple question to ask would be “do you trust your leadership and your colleagues “? And for leadership “do you trust your people?” If the answer is “no” you already have identified the problem and no process or organizational structure will help.

Obviously these questions will never be asked because the response will be inconvenient.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#14

Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…

The person who knows you best is yourself. By that token, your manager will have less insight into you than you do. So defaulting to their judgement for everything will lead to decisions that are sub-optimal or upset you.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#15
Clearly defined hierarchies are underrated, at least in this space. I really do not want to have seven bosses, or to be responsible for being part of some amorphous Valve-like leadership blob.

Setting up a clear chain of command, and, most essentially, following it, would perhaps stifle a few, but it works, and it works well, and it is a considerably less anxious and stress-inducing arrangement for everyone involved.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#16
post #2

The challenge with this is when you have a team with members that, by and large, wants to be led for various reasons (lacking motivation, does not want to lead, distracted with other priorities, etc.). In a team like this, there needs to be someone that “calls the shots,” as it were, while giving every team member enough of a voice to feel like they are heard and enough autonomy to do the right thing (provided they h…

I don't know if someone like that (the follower) is really capable of significantly contributing.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#17

Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…

You make some good points about responsibility and accountability. But team members absolutely need to be, and feel, heard.

Also, there's a world of difference between "managing" and "leading". Conflating the two is a root cause of many problems.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#18
> I suggested two options to them:

> 1. Either we have another person do the project management - and they have no say in how this will be done. Perhaps we even entertain the idea of an external hire - who is not an engineer. They won't have the engineering context, so they'll ask for more frequent updates, and have more regular check-in meetings. Also, anytime something seems to be delayed, they will have to come to the engineers to ask them how and what can be mitigated.

Not listing his "option 2" since the description for "option 1" is already so loaded that it's obvious the correct answer is "anything but option 1". I can't say I'm a fan of such manipulation.

> After this chat, everyone went with option #2.

Surprise, surprise.

Ultimately, the problem with these kinds of wisdom posts is that they suffer from the "everyone is the same, given the right chance or push" fallacy. We love it when the parts are all the same because it reduces our cognitive load, but that just doesn't happen in reality, especially with people. We can see from his "options" that he ran up against this problem, and solved it by forcing people to adopt the mold he'd set for them. Now everyone's a leader! Problem solved.

Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader

#19
The places I’ve worked at where “everyone is a leader” ends up with 1 person feeling adamant about something. And everyone else disagreeing, but then saying: sure whatever, we will do it that way.

Nobody wants to have conflict and nobody is in charge. Leads to a lot of very bad decisions imo.

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