Leadership

TL;DR: Be an active participant in supporting your engineers and the organization

Where the engineers own the how of building product, engineering leadership owns the what.

Where engineers own the how of building the product, engineering leadership supporting the how means

• Providing the necessary people, tools and processes that the engineers justify the need for
• Supporting initiatives the engineers deem necessary, and can be connected to strategic objectives
• Maintaining the bridge between strategic objectives and tactical execution
• Continuously monitoring and maintaining the well-being of the engineers as they go about the how of building product
• Unburdening engineers of activities that don’t generally support the how of building the product

In supporting the engineers, partners, customers and the product, be prepared to actively engage the levers available to you.

Active Leadership

The active leader takes deliberate, calibrated steps to deliver specific outcomes on a regular basis.

If you’re looking forward to any outcome in your directs, partners, or your organization, ask the question:

“What am I doing on a regular basis to elicit this outcome I desire?”

This should not be construed as a mechanism to micromanage. Rather, it involves the measured application of pre-determined levers available only to the leadership cadre of the organization

Active Leadership and The Guardrail Paradox

Where active leadership encourages deliberate engagement and use of leadership tools and instruments, it may not be sustainable over a long enough period of time.

This is where guardrails come in.

Active leadership engages in the deliberate and systematic installation of guardrails around their organization. These guardrails are systems and processes that help automate or otherwise safeguard the qualities they wish to sustain in the organization.

By deploying well managed guardrails, an active leader can then transition into a more passive leadership in certain aspects; the well managed guardrails and quality gates should assume more responsibility in safeguarding parts of the engineering culture.

“Support” is a active sport

Where there are things the active leader can delegate to guardrails and quality gates (and only after an initial active investment), some guardrails will still require some level of ongoing active engagement. For example:

• Supporting the engineers growth
• Actively providing what the engineers need to deliver what’s expected of them
• Scope management
• Fostering healthy interpersonal communication
• Maintaining a fulfilling and generally satisfying work environment
• Providing visibility and delivering credit where its due

Steering Group

A steering group should consist of middle management and other stakeholders with access to resources. These are the individuals that will be able to

• Mentor individuals in a pod
• Remove obstacles to milestones
• Share context across the broader organization
• Allocate time and resources to tasks and milestones defined by pods
• Help keep milestones aligned with larger strategic objectives and key results

The Role of Leadership

In the context of BMD, leadership should be able to answer specific questions about what they are doing for specific guardrails.

• “What are you doing to generate goodwill?”

• “What are you doing to maintain consistent context sharing?”

• “How are we enabling our partners?”

These are examples that senior management, engineers and partners should be able to ask; leaders should have good answers.