Leadership in the development team
Hi! I'm Pavel Karavashkin, I'm in charge of development T-API platforms at T-Bank. Our team consists of nine people who write in different languages and live in different cities, they have different ages and professional experience.
I am also a leader in the “system analysis” profession at T-Business and help develop a community of specialists in our company. At one of my previous jobs, I managed to open a system analysis department from scratch and hire 12 people in a year.
In this article, I want to share tips that help me manage a team and develop leadership in technical specialists of various profiles.
Formulate and communicate values to the team
Everyone has their own values. When I became a manager, I formulated, wrote down and communicated mine to the team. My colleagues took this openness well, it became clearer to them what vector we would adhere to.
My main principles:
Create more by working less. This is part of the Pareto principle and the concept of lean manufacturing. My goal is to increase the efficiency of each employee, especially myself, so that we can achieve more while maintaining working hours.
A culture of no suffering – work should not cause pain. Suffering reduces productivity, so it is important to go to work with joy and return home with joy. This is not hedonism, but rather the principle of utilitarianism.
Regardless of what decisions I make and what the current team composition is, these two principles are always taken into account.
So, my goal as a leader is to create an environment where employees enjoy their work while doing the things that add the most value.
To be a guarantor of stability
Imagine that there is a great leader whom you respect. You look up to him and are proud to be part of his team.
You have weekly 1-2-1s and everything is going well. One day he tells you he is thinking about moving to another department or even changing companies.
How will you feel? Someone will, of course, be happy that a warm place will soon become available, but overall the situation is rather sad. A valuable employee, whose opinion was important to you, is leaving the team.
What benefit does he or you get from him saying this? A warning? Preparation? And if he's just in an autumnal mood and nothing really changes, what benefit will there be?
If the employees believe in the manager, he must be a guarantor of stability. This means not questioning his loyalty to the company, the team, the product he works on.
The leader must be loyal
Discuss your career plans with your manager 1-2-1, friends, spouse, but not with your team! For them, you have always been here and will always be here. You are a bastion of stability, faith in the future, a symbol of the team. Are you planning to change teams? No! Company? No! When (and if) this happens, just give two weeks' notice.
It is important to feel the situation: if a leader talks about his plans to change jobs and creates the impression of being unreliable, the team cannot work effectively with him and make plans for the future. This applies to individual development plans and joint project management, because this is a long-term game.
Don't hire people with weak soft skills
In a long-term game, personnel matters more than ever. Besides, we hire people not just for a team, but for a company.
I admit, at a fit interview I ask the question “How do I see the candidate in five years?” To myself. In my head. It is important for me to understand whether there will be a match with the company and the team, whether we will be able to ensure long-term fruitful cooperation with the candidate.
I know people who went from zero to senior in four years, and in large companies, on cool projects. But in teams there are also those who cannot do the most difficult and unpleasant task, ask many wrong questions and do not understand the answers correctly, make mistakes, although they are hung with test cases and requirements. Why do these employees work like this? It seems to me that a lot rests on soft skills: they allow you to grow, effectively manage yourself, be responsible and demonstrate leadership qualities.
The question is at what level the employee's soft skills are developed. My opinion is that if they are weak, it is not a fact that you will be able to help the employee develop them. You can read about adult learning, study fundamental works, for example, by Spencer, or pump up employees through Lencioni's book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, but there are still no guarantees that you will be able to achieve results.
I was creating a systems analysis department at another company. Its field was not the most attractive, the office was not in the best location, and the hiring process was difficult, but within a year we managed to attract 12 junior and middle-level specialists.
It would seem that everything is simple: do onboarding, standardize documentation and processes, send them for training. We did everything, but the same tools worked differently for everyone. Some people learned and grew quickly, while others could not understand the basic rules at all. In the end, it all came down to specific people, their characteristics, capabilities, and motivators.
In retrospect, I see the main mistake as being too soft filters during interviews, because I hired employees with weak soft skills, among others.
The Spencers described the competency iceberg in their book, Competence at Work. Here are some quick takeaways:
You can teach an employee knowledge and skills through mentoring.
You can instill values or a vision of yourself in him through motivation.
But nothing can be done about fundamental views and patterns of thinking.
I have an example of one of the smartest colleagues in my entire career – a leading system architect. He had a lot of experience, he always shared his knowledge, but he was not flexible. For example, he could not design systems with crutches, despite direct requests to do it quickly, even if not particularly well: in specific cases, this was exactly what needed to be done. In fact, we had a top specialist in our team, but we could not implement the tasks we needed. It all resulted in wasted resources, not a very positive experience on both sides, and parting as a logical outcome.
When hiring, I look at soft skills, teamwork, and the employee's potential. Of course, there is a qualification for technical skills, but soft skills carry more risks. Soft skills should not just be there, but they should be suitable for your team and projects.
Charge with ideas on 1-2-1
There is a clear sign of a good 1-2-1 with a manager: it is useful. A great 1-2-1 is when it is useful to both. I have discovered an interesting aspect of this meeting: it is very convenient to charge colleagues with ideas through it.
During the work, ideas appear on the leader's strategic map, and not always simple or popular ones. Before voicing them, I try to find like-minded people first, and 1-2-1 helps me: in a trusting environment, you can convey the value of the idea, discuss it on equal terms, and test the waters.
With the help of 1-2-1, you can infect the idea so that the employees themselves want to implement it and be responsible for the result. It seems to me that it is impossible to achieve this only with directive management.
After a 1-2-1 series where you discuss ideas, it will be easier to present it: the most zealous ones are already prepared and there is even a hero who will take them on, the rest will agree either by default or under pressure from the majority. At most, there will be an easy discussion.
The main thing in 1-2-1 is to communicate with respect:
You don't have fools working for you, and they will consider and perceive blatant manipulation negatively.
Employees communicate with each other too, so if you tell them completely different things, it will be strange and funny.
Throwing out too many empty ideas without further implementation can kill the value of the process.
Be careful with newbies and juniors: they may not understand the value of the idea because they are still out of context, or they may not perceive the pressure the same way, even though the idea would have been accepted anyway.
Earn authority
There are many definitions of what leadership, management, power are, and it seems important to me to independently form an understanding of leadership. For me, it is more like an atmosphere, a microclimate of a team than specific actions and management patterns. But all this is impossible if the leader does not have authority.
Let's figure it out. As a starting point, let's take an advanced leader from practices Management 3.0.
A Servant Leader leads with humility, empathy, and compassion. He or she builds bridges between people and groups and inspires a work culture of engaged people.
Everything is fine in this concept, except for the difference in management cultures in Western and domestic companies.
Servant leader is a soft delegating management style that focuses on employee interaction. It is considered to be more effective than a “firm hand”. We do not hold softness in high regard, but without it we will not be able to develop leadership (read why in Management 3.0), and without firmness we will not be able to manage effectively. Therefore, I suggest adding a pinch of our seasoning to this concept:
Servant leaders use mutual authority, respect and trust as the basis for their leadership.
I am a former ERP consultant — I implemented and debugged company planning systems, I am a systems analyst, a systems architect and I do not know how to program in the languages of my team: SCALA, .NET, JS (React, Angular). But I can create excellent YAML descriptions of REST API, create XSD from scratch by hand, draw architectural diagrams and write technical specifications that are understandable to everyone. And also — I can speak, make presentations, establish diplomacy, and my team sees it.
When someone does something cool for the common good, then shares it – colleagues begin to respect him. Authority is earned by deeds, solved problems, often overtime and self-sacrifice.
An authoritative IT specialist is not necessarily the strongest developer. Even deep back-engineers have an understanding of a good and bad manager, analyst, QA. Therefore, it can be earned in your environment and by other qualities in addition to technical ones, but the main thing is to have authority.
Authority, like leadership, is contagious. I occasionally meet people who proudly recall working with …, and name strong leaders, even though these leaders left the company several years ago. It's like an aura of support in an online game, like a banner on the battlefield: the hero next to you creates other heroes. If he can do it, you can do it too. After all, this is the guy with whom you have 1-2-1 every week.
Make sure there is no toxic person on the team
The team is a system, an organism, and it needs to be supported, because it is susceptible to diseases. One of the diseases is toxicity. This disease is not so easy to recognize, because often tough, overly aggressive people are mistakenly considered toxic.
A toxic employee can be a quiet one who simply grumbles during a weekly meeting that we “didn’t manage to close the sprint again.” A diligent worker, as if “rooting” for the team and worrying that we are constantly doing the wrong tasks. So, not everything is so clear-cut.
To recognize it, I look for red flags like these:
Disrespect – to you, to colleagues, to business. Complete lack of authority – even the tech lead is an equal to him at best.
Lack of sharing of success. When everything is bad – he swears, when everything is good – he is silent.
Gossip, squabbles. If you feel that people are whispering behind your back, something is going wrong for unknown reasons and he is always there.
Ignoring feedback. He is the one who doesn't hear you, although others do.
Attempts to manipulate. Provocative, meaningless questions, unspoken phrases.
The emergence of a toxic person is a dangerous situation. The problem is that such people do not change.
My opinion: first, you need to discuss the problem with the employee. He must understand and accept it, then you decide together how to fix it, and if everything is good, the employee begins to change. In my experience, this has never worked with toxicity, and in such a situation, it is important to turn off the “good leader”. Remember, you are responsible for the well-being of the team and its effectiveness in the company.
Learn to build a system that works without you
It seems to me that it is important for a strong leader to develop the credo “I should not be needed”, about the same says our service station in its Telegram channel. I am sure that it is possible and necessary to build a system that will not break down if a manager goes on vacation, for training, or anywhere else.
Let me give you an example. In the master's program, we were taught the principles of Management 2.0 – it's about delegation and efficiency. There was a story going around back then: the company's management gathered all the managers and took them to a desert island without communication for a month.
After returning, their teams were divided into three groups:
The first ones began to work worse without a leader – their managers were sent for training.
The second ones remained at the same level, nothing changed – their managers were promoted.
Others began to work better – their managers were fired.
I disagree with this conclusion. On the contrary, the managers of the third group are also worth noting: they pumped up the team's leadership skills so that employees themselves could formulate problems, look for solutions and develop their direction.
I recently went on vacation for two weeks and upon returning I was surprised at how well my colleagues continued to cope with tasks. They created and completed several large epics themselves, came up with the idea of holding mini-retrospectives among a small group of developers, and used an interesting format. This is how the team demonstrated its development.
I was incredibly happy because I realized that the guys had become leaders. They were already solving all the problems really well, but when I was constantly working, I didn't notice any changes. But here, in two weeks of being out of context, I saw the growth and development of processes, new ideas and cool proposals. And they didn't need me to start doing something.
The team should develop without the supervision of the leader, and the leader should not interfere with its development – this is what can be considered a sign of success.
Conclusion
At the end I will leave you with a summary of the entire article.
A leader is always loyal.
He has a strategy and a vision of the future, or rather even an idea.
He shares his idea not only through presentations and articles. The main work takes place in personal conversations.
Ideas take a long time to implement. When implemented successfully, others become idea leaders themselves.
Leadership is contagious, authority belongs to the whole team.
Toxicity is the corrosion of leadership development. Our enemy.
I hope I could help someone. And if you have something to share on this topic, welcome to the comments or come to our event for team leaders on September 19 at the office on Belorusskaya. We will talk about the culture of team leadership, discuss the topic of “How to understand that your team is working well”, listen to the presentations of colleagues and chat. You can register until September 17.
