Leadership is a skill

It is time we value leadership skills higher within tech and recognise that they can and should be trained.

–Do you code?

–I haven’t written any production code for about a decade, but I excel in leadership. Considering you are looking for a manager of managers, I assume there will be much more skilled engineers to write the code.

–Of course, but we are looking for someone who recently coded. Our CTO still submits code sometimes, and we believe it is a good practice.

This is an excerpt of conversations I’ve had regarding being a hands-on technical leader. Our industry is filled with misconceptions about leadership skills and management. The value assigned to excelling as a leader vs technical knowledge often reflects the maturity of an organisation, and sometimes a whole business.

Before we discuss the value of leadership we need a basic understanding of why we need managers in tech organizations. Charity Majors wrote a deep dive with excellent points:

• Systems self-organizing or not) tend to create a hierarchy once it reaches a certain size. This is to allow focus on smaller areas of the system, reduce cognitive load, and reduce the need for coordination.
• Managers do tasks. Tasks that can be done by non-managers too. Tasks that are needed to run a successful tech company. These include hiring, coaching, project management, facilitating, analyzing metrics, organizational design, and much more. When managers do some of these, engineers can focus on solving technical problems.
• Managers help coordinate and align with strategy, as well as create strategy. This is not unique to managers, but often they hold more information and a more systemic perspective given their place in the hierarchy.
• Skilled managers will do a lot of glue work. They are the catch-all and will pick up tasks that are needed, but don’t fall into a specialist area. Anything from making sure the celebration happens (and someone buys the cake) to communicating with partners, negotiating with suppliers, and helping a team get unstuck.

These are excellent reasons for having managers. I would like to add one that I have found very important:

Managers are expected to excel in leadership.

Leadership is not exclusively for managers. Everyone in an organization is expected to be able to lead. Everything from leading themselves to leading projects, tech decisions, or supporting colleagues. Successful managers will spend time improving their leadership skills. Just as with any other skill, leadership can be trained and improved, but it is hard.

In tech organizations, we often talk about soft and hard skills. This expresses the idea that there are softer skills, not needed as much, that are about people and feelings. Hard skills that are about technology. Soft skills can be picked up by anyone. Hard skills have to be taught and trained and require a lot of experience to excel in.

I dislike the idea of soft skills. Instead, I use the phrase difficult skills. Excelling in leadership is difficult. To be successful requires a lot of knowledge and experience. These skills can be learned and improved. There are no simple instructions. Leadership skills are complex (we are dealing with humans). I argue that becoming skilled in leadership requires more investment than becoming skilled in a specific technology. Tech skills are mostly complicated (they are constructed, and most of them have predictive behavior). The complex part of engineering comes when you put a lot of technologies together to create a whole system.

A great engineering manager still has to understand how the sausage is made. How you create technical systems. What great looks like within software development. This is something you pick up with experience. By having the fortune to spend time with and learning from highly skilled engineers. Without this, you cannot be a successful manager within software organizations. But once you make the transition into management, the skills to intentionally build are within leadership. Learn systems thinking, how to resolve conflicts, how to model behavior, how to communicate well, and other skills that will make a big difference in how you create a multiplier effect.

The expert leader will go deeper into technical skills. She will use these skills to make decisions and judge other’s work. This is the initial leadership style of a skilled engineer who has been promoted to manager. Leading this way can seldom create results beyond what this manager can grasp or create themselves. If the results are bad, this manager will double down on technical skills to become even better.

The catalyst leader will be able to help others create the best result. She will use tools like facilitation and coaching to continuously improve how the team is working. This leadership style requires maturity and letting go of control. It creates the space for a team to reach results with a diverse set of ideas. Sometimes this will lead to failures and learning, and sometimes this method is slower than an expert making the right decision. If results are bad this manager will reflect and use the feedback to improve the system. Perhaps there are new skills she needs to pick up to help the team forward, but they are seldom within a specific tool or technology.

I believe it is time we start valuing leadership skills higher within tech organizations. We have to encourage and give managers space to train these skills and help each other improve them. I hope that this will lead to more skilled managers, a better working environment, and more empathic organizations.

Here are a few points I have observed to help create an environment of good leadership:

• Create a forum where managers can reflect together on their challenges. A safe space where managers can advise each other.
• Try pair management! Pair up to observe each other in situations where you exhibit leadership. Share observations and reflect together.
• Create an alignment within your organization on what you expect from a manager. Most of us know what great engineering looks like, but what does great management look like? Agree on the ambitions. The challenge is that this cannot be done without the buy-in and modeling of behavior from upper management.
• Make sure there are proper IC career paths. People who are experts should have a clear career path that does not require them to go into management.
• Start valuing life experience higher when hiring. I have seen great managers, reaching great results, without having an engineering background. A candidate still needs a lot of experience in how great systems are built. This experience and knowledge are NOT relative to the amount of years a person spent coding.

And finally, stop talking about soft skills. Leadership is important and consists of many difficult skills.