Forem: Tech Lead Coaching

Micromanaging, trust, and transparency - Letter No. 9

Michael Rice — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 21:57:12 +0000

Hey folks,

Letter No. 9 hit inboxes yesterday.

In it, I did a deep dive (for a daily letter, anyway) on how you can navigate between being a hands on manager and a micromanager.

And this particular letter is free, so give it a read, but as promised, here's a quick summary here on dev.to!

At the outset, of course everyone hates being micromanaged. It destroys trust with your team, so obviously you want to stay away from it.

However, being hands on as a tech lead, engineering manager, or startup founder is inevitable and in some instances desirable. Every manager, sooner or later, will need to dive into the details, whether it's because he or she is managing a high profile project, under time pressure, or something has gone off the rails. Moreover, a lot of EMs at software companies spend a lot of their time writing code.

So the most important question is not whether you are managing details, but how the folks on your team are reacting to your fine grained management. "Micromanagement" is less of a process and more of a feeling by the one being micromanaged!

So, in the letter, I suggest two approaches to minimize the micromanagement effect. First is to check our motivations: if you're feeling the need to control your team for a variety of reasons, that could be a red flag.

Second, make sure you have a solid understanding of your team. If you don't, then use this as an opportunity to gain that understanding and gain trust with your team.

Then later in the letter, I mention that--for better or worse--there's no law against micromanagement. There are, however, some really important trust issues that we need to consider as leaders at our companies.

Without trust, your engineers can't do their best, creative work.

Bringing it together: leadership, law, and code

Michael Rice — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 03:18:34 +0000

I've been a little quiet here for the past few months!

Basically, I've been trying to figure out what to do.

On being pulled in three directions at once

As you know, if you follow me, I'm really into tech leadership topics, especially for new tech leads, hands on engineering managers, and CTOs or VPEs of startups. I even self published a book called How To Be A Tech Lead ($0).

But what I didn't mention here is that somewhere along the way of my 20+ year career tech is that I went to law school. Hey, write code in the early 2000s was anything but cool, and it was a nice break. I did really well, clerked for a federal judge, and passed the California bar exam.

And I still love writing and leading sessions teaching people about law, especially law for software engineers.

Bringing it all together

Finally, I still write a lot of code for a living. So I get kind of confused on what to focus on: Tech leadership? Law? Code?

Screw it.

Why not just start writing about all three???

There's a ton to talk about. In some places they'll intersect: like being a great tech lead and employment law issues. In others, the might just be kind of interesting: like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

In all cases, I think I'll be able to continue (and enhance) my mission of making you a more effective, in the trenches tech leader.

So I started a (paid - $7/mo) email list on Substack called Leadership, Law, Code that I hope you'll subscribe to.

But I'll keep posting here from time to time--this is a great community and I'd love to engage you here!

Stand before the whiteboard and rule the world!

Michael Rice — Fri, 17 May 2019 05:33:20 +0000

I always say, he or she who stands at the whiteboard rules the world. Here’s how and why to break out of meeting mediocrity, even remotely.

As much as everyone dreads a boring meeting, meetings are actually a tech leader’s best friend. Humans were probably calling meetings at least as far back as when cavemen elders dealt with weighty issues of caveman days. Today, we still use meetings (or should) when we need to talk in real time about something important (hopefully important to everyone, not just a few 🙄).

As mystified as our caveman ancestors would be by our asynchronous tools like Slack (and associated Giphy and Emoji), there is something solemn about physically (or, virtually) being in someone’s presence and the ceremony of “calling a meeting” to focus everyone’s attention.

I have a lot more to say on why meetings are (or, can be) valuable, but I’ll spare you. For now, I want to suggest one hack for making an impact in meetings, including virtual meetings.

Own the Meeting With a Dry-Erase Marker

Imagine yourself in a meeting room. Folks are seated around a conference table. It’s boring. A few are trying to talk through some technical issue and making noises that sound like “blah blah blah blah blah blah.” Half (or more) of the conversation is spent trying clarify confusion, correct misunderstandings, or simply struggling to keep the meeting on topic. Half (or more) of the people in the room aren’t even paying attention and they’re on their laptops or phones (hopefully, reading this post on dev.to 👀).

If you’re one of my tech leads who I write to a lot, or even if you’re not, I beg you, please: rise up against this mediocrity!

Rise up, er, stand up. Grab a Dry Erase marker (pro tip: carry your own markers because they invariably don’t work in most meeting rooms), and start drawing some boxes or writing some bullet points on the whiteboard.

Even if you’re feeling shy or nervous, do it anyway! The more you feel that way, the more important it is for you to do it!

Even if you aren’t a visual learner or communicator, do it anyway because there is something magical about standing up and going to the whiteboard.

First, it’s a physical act of leadership. You’re self selecting yourself as a leader, and by doing something physically dominant relative to everyone else (who are probably slouching in their chairs with glazed looks in their eyes) you’re communicating with your whole body that you’re taking leadership. I’m not a scientist, but there’s something about the physicality that seems tap into our primal lizard brains.

Second, by doing this, you increase the energy level in the room quite a bit because you’re physically moving around now. You'll increase your own energy just by standing up and opening yourself up. The meeting suddenly becomes more interesting, engaging, and even (somewhat) entertaining because things will feel like they’re happening. (Another pro tip: move back and forth across the whiteboard, even around the room, if you really want to amp up this effect.)

Third, now you control the conversation. Partly it’s because you’re physically bigger than the folks in the room when you’re standing and they’re sitting, partly it’s because your voice is literally projecting over them, and partly it’s because you’re drawing (literally, with your Dry Erase marker) their visual attention to you.

But mostly, through your diagrams or by writing key words from the conversation, you have control or at least a lot more influence on where the conversation is going and what the important points are, even among those in the room with more authority or influence than you have.

It’s truly an amazing hack, it’s so easy to do, and not enough of us do it.

And besides, someone put that whiteboard in the room for a reason. Use it!

What Happens If You're Remote?

Owning the whiteboard is a power move, to be sure, but for the past few years, I’ve been on remote teams, so I haven’t had as many whiteboard moments as I would like. But I found a hack I want to share with you. It’s not quite as effective as the physical act of moving to the whiteboard, but it does give you some of the same influence and control.

First, go out and buy yourself a little pen tablet, like a Wacom tablet, or even, I suppose a good pen for your normal Apple or Android tablet. I use a $59 Bluetooth-enabled Wacom Intuos tablet that I carry around with me in my backpack. Trying to whiteboard without a handwriting instrument is really hard and/or slow in my opinion.

Second, on your next Slack or Zoom call, when the meeting starts going off the rails and/or descending into mediocrity, take out that Wacom tablet and start a screen share. Some technologies, like Zoom, have whiteboard support build right in. Slack lets people write on each other’s screen.

In a pinch though, you can just turn on a screen share and use the “draw” feature of Microsoft Powerpoint or a free drawing app like Tayasui Sketches for the Mac. Powerpoint looks like more like a whiteboard, in my mind, but I’ve used drawing apps too.

The Technique Doesn’t Always Work

There are some problems with my technique of course, but usually it’s manageable.

Some examples, and possible solutions, include:

The most dreaded thing, to me, is when someone else stands up and asks to “borrow” your precious Dry Erase marker and is now using your own technique - this has happened to me on occasion, sometimes the only option is to try just stand there longer, or maybe the other person has better ideas and you can just sit down and let them drive.
There’s no whiteboard or paper - you’re kind of screwed, sorry; next time, find a room with a whiteboard.
There are no pens, or they’re all out of ink - ugh, remember, a true professional brings their own Dry-Erase markers :-)
The whiteboard is BEHIND the key people in the meeting - this can be a problem because they will physically have to turn around to look at it, and can sometimes dismissively ignore your bold, physical act of leadership (you might have to ask them to move, which may or may not work).
Sometimes the room is small and you have climb over chairs to get to the whiteboard or it's physically hard to move around - just take a moment to have people move around a little.
If you have people dialed in to the meeting or you don’t have video technology set up, then the effectiveness of this hack can be reduced a bit.
Likewise, if it’s a virtual meeting, some people might be dialed in and won’t be able to see the whiteboard.
In a long meeting, you can get a little physically tired moving around so much.

What do you think? Do you already use this hack in meetings? Why do you think it works or doesn’t work? Do you have any other tech tips for remote meetings?

A Little Plug

I love writing ideas and getting stuff out there to help tech leads, hands on engineering managers, startup CTOs/VPEs, and even consultants make their leadership more impactful. But more importantly, I want you to be part of a community that helps each other. I call it Sidewalk Training and we do a combination of a lot of free events and a few paid trainings to help. Hope you'll join us or start with a free mini course on being a tech lead.

Sure you want to be a tech lead?

Michael Rice — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 03:53:19 +0000

Being a tech lead is a bigger career step than many think. So if you’re going to do it right, you should think about your motivations for jumping in.

In the role, there are going to be ups and downs. Some days you are going to be blown away by how creative, forward thinking, and generally awesome your team is. "Hey this tech lead thing is hardly work at all," you may say.

On other days, it’s going to be incredibly frustrating to get people to understand your technical vision, let alone execute on it:

Engineers all have their own preferences and experiences, so many will challenge or even resist your vision.
Even if they accept your vision, engineers don’t always implement it the way you thought you clearly explained.
Sometimes they do weird things like adding inexplicable dependencies ("Why on earth do they need that whole library for one little function?" you might wonder.)
And there are as many other reasons as there are people on earth for why it may be frustrating!

As a tech lead, you can’t code your way around those problems. You're going to have to dive into some of the people aspects of engineering. So, I want you to think about whether you want to put yourself on this human roller coaster.

Do You Really Want to be a Tech Lead?

Be honest with yourself: do you really want to do it? After all, writing code as an individual contributor is a perfectly rewarding and endlessly interesting career. You may be wondering if you should take the plunge.

To answer the question, it may help if you take a moment to consider your motivations and intentions for the role. Why do you think you may want to be a tech lead?

You could be considering the role for extrinsic reasons, such as:

wanting to show career progress on your LinkedIn profile,
making more money (I have bad news on that, by the way),
wanting people to think you're important because you have the word "lead" in your title,
and, my personal favorite, because you think you have a better technical approach than your current tech lead.

If you answered in any of these ways, then the frustrations I mentioned above may end up driving you mad and may make you regret your decision.

If, however, you are at a point in your career where you want to have a bigger impact than you can have individually, then you might be on to a better answer to the question. Some better reasons include:

You’ve hit a point in your career where you aren’t growing enough with mere technical challenges.
You know you want to grow both personally and professionally, and you suspect working as a lead will help you do that.
You’re excited for any kind of new challenge, not just purely technical challenges.

If these answers seem to speak to you, then those "frustrations" I mentioned above won't actually be frustrations. They're actually very interesting problems and opportunities to learn about both management and leadership.

In fact, if these are your answers, you may learn to love the tech lead role.

What do you think? What were your reasons for getting into the role? If you're not in it, what are your thoughts about it?

PS - this material was adopted from my free book, How To Be A Tech Lead, currently available only on Leanpub. I also organize the community based Tech Lead Coaching Network where tech leads help each other :-)