Technical Leadership

How can I be a leader and keep up my technical skills at the same time? 

What can I do to learn leadership? Why do people see me as a leader, when I don't feel that way? If I'm a leader, will I have to boss people around? What is leadership, anyway?

Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered. Each person is unique, so we can expect many different leadership styles, and we must be able to switch appropriately from one to another as the situation demands.

The best technical leaders have a problem-solving leadership style. They have one thing in common: A faith that there's always a better way. Their entire orientation is toward creating an environment in which everyone can solve problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions as required to get the job done.

The most widespread and harmful myth about leadership is that only Leaders can lead, where the capital L indicates that someone has been appointed to the position of Leader. There are, in fact, many more potential leaders than Leaders. You may have no title at all, but be the one who makes your group start to function in new and more effective ways.

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they react to failure.

If you are a leader, the people are your work. In a complex environment, even the most task-oriented leader is forced to put people first, or the task won't get done.

Power is not a possession, but a relationship. You possess expertise. Any power you get from expertise is based on a relationship between you and someone else. 

Your software engineering expertise would contribute no power if you lead a mountain climbing team. If your whole team consists of novice developers, your expertise will give you considerable power. If your team are also experts like you, they will pay more attention to your organizational power.

Easier said than done. Most innovators who move into leadership positions know little or nothing about organizational power. Thus, the new leader needs new powers just when technical power is about to slip away.

If people don't want your help, you will never succeed in helping them, no matter how smart or wonderful you are. Always check whether people want your help. Attempts to help are often interpreted as attempts to interfere. 

Effective help can only start with mutual agreement on a clear definition of the problem.

Not everyone likes being a leader, but many are slow to realize that they don't. By the time they do, they have usually lost the skills or attitudes or illusions that would let them move back to their old status. Think about why you want to be a leader, and all the assets and liabilities you have as a leader.

"Becoming a Technical Leader" by Gerald M. Weinberg

Hidden potential

Everyone has hidden potential, but how do we unlock it?

Character

Is it about building character skills, like how often do you take initiative to ask questions? Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills and perspectives? Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?

Perfectionism

Unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Be disciplined in deciding when to push for the best and when to settle for good enough. Don't obsess by details and to find the right solution on tiny problems that don't matter. Find the right problems to solve instead.

Passion

Although it takes deliberate practice to achieve greater things, we shouldn't drill so hard that we drive the joy out of the activity and turn it into an obsessive slog. Persistence is more likely to translate into performance when passion is present.

Breaks

Take breaks. They help you unlock fresh ideas, deepen your learning and sustain your harmonious passion. Even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy.

Side hustle

When asking people what it takes to achieve greater things, one of the most common answers is that you need to be laser focused and single-minded in your dedication. Get in early, go home late. Put your hobbies away. But the evidence tells a different story. Hobbies or a side hustle can be a source of energy - if they are in a different area from your job.

Learn from experts?

Do we learn more from experts? If you are taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. One reason is the distance they have traveled - they have come too far to remember what it's like being in your shoes.

You need to make experts' implicit knowledge explicit. Ask them to retrace their route. Get them to drop pins - the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs, the crossroads they faced, skills they sought out, advice they took or ignored, or changes they made.

A sense of progress

The strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. Achieving this doesn't require huge gains. Fuel can come from small wins. With a few small wins, you start to gain speed.

A rocky start followed by later success

It's a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they have reached. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they have climbed, and how they have grown along the way. Early failure and a rocky start followed by later success is a mark of hidden potential. The key question is not how long people have done a job. Find out what they have learned and how well they can learn to do a job.

Read

A love of reading often begins at home. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. 

Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we value.

"Hidden Potential" by Adam Grant

Deep down we are all learners

It is in our nature, and we love it.

What images are evoked when you hear the word "learning"? Sitting passively in classrooms or meetings and listening? 

Taking in information is not the same as learning.

When we have learned we are able to do something we never were able to do. Learning is about expanding our ability to produce the results we truly want. We never "arrive". It's a process.

The best learners get comfortable being uncomfortable. The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but isn't necessarily how you learn best. Practicing something before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires you to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

The most powerful learning comes from direct experiences. As babies we learn eating and walking by trial and error. We didn't learn to speak our mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by bi-quarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules.

There is a dilemma here. Yes, we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important business decisions. How do you and your organization learn then?

Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. When teams are learning, the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

Is it crazy to say that the primary objective of a team is to learn? Isn't the primary goal to deliver value? But how do you know you deliver optimal value without learning? The faster you learn, and the quicker you can integrate those insights into your delivery, the more value is created.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity - how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

You probably have performance goals. What about learning goals? Getting A in French vs. Learn to speak French. Which one leads to mastery?

But hey, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience someone said. But we are busy, so we don't have time to just sit around and talk, right? We barely have time to think. 

Reflection that isn't connected to action is what makes people think they don't have time for this. We need a culture and the discipline to integrate reflection and action.

Teaching others is a surprisingly powerful method of learning. My favorite. The protégé effect. 

If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, and fill our own gaps. It is simple. Next time you have learned something, explain it to someone else.

Learning starts with me. I can never expect the people around me to be more open and willing to learn and improve than I am. 

To learn I must be humble enough to realize I have something to learn.

How does NASA organize a company party?

They planet ...

We fear uncertainty

We fear uncertainty. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work. How can you know what you are doing when no one has done it before? 

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. If you stick to the familiar, you won't find the unexpected.

First-principles

Reason from first-principles. Doubt everything you can possibly doubt until you are left with unquestionable truths. That's where you start. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, what if this were not true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this this or replace it with something better?

Compare oranges and apples

Approach life not with the assumption that we know (or should know) the answers, but with the desire to learn, experiment and absorb. Compare oranges and apples, look for connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Tackle the hardest part first

If your goal is one percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. You must then start with a blank slate and question all assumptions. Picture the perfect and ask what it takes to build it. Move backwards. Tackle the hardest part first.

Problem reframing

In schools we are taught to answer problems, not to reframe them. Problems may have multiple causes, don't stick with the first that pops to mind. Don't fell in love with your favorite solution and define the problem as the absence of it.

Opinions are sticky, hypotheses not

We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Opinions are sticky. Instead, generate several working hypotheses. Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested. Your goal should be to find what's right, not to be right.

Failure is success if we learn from it

Celebrate lessons from failure, not failure itself. Good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. In uncertainty, outcomes are not completely within your control. Focus on the variables you can control – the inputs – instead of the outputs. Even if the project fails, you can take the input that worked and use them elsewhere.

Surviving your own success

When we succeed, we believe everything went according to the plan. When we succeed we stop pushing boundaries. Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure. Instead of risking something new, we maintain the same "proven" formula that led to our success.

Remain in Day 1

The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1. We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and return to first principles.

That's the mindset of a rocket scientist!

"Think Like a Rocket Scientst" by Ozan Varol

Strategy, strategy and strategy

... or shall we call it an action agenda? 

I loved the conversation between Professor Richard Rumelt and Lenny Rachitsky at Lenny's Newsletter.

Goals, ambitions, visions, missions, values, wished-for end states - none of these things are a strategy.

And it's not true that these things have to be in place before you can have a strategy. Strategies are fundamentally about what you’ll do in response to a challenge. Strategy is problem solving, and you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. 

As understanding deepens, the strategist seeks the crux - the one challenge that both is critical and appears to be solvable.

What makes up a good strategy?

A diagnosis of the situation. Figure out what's going on here and understand the challenge you face. The challenge can be to deal with change and competition, it can be triggered by a large opportunity or it can be internal like outdated routines, bureaucracy, or lack of collaboration.

A guiding policy, i.e. what will you do and what will you not do with the challenge. It is "guiding" because it channels actions in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.

A set of coherent actions that will carry out the guiding policy. This part is so easy to leave out because people like to think of strategy as a high level conceptual thing. Strategy is about action. There must be enough clarity about action to bring concepts down to earth.

When deciding what you will do with the challenge, find your source of advantage. Do you know something that others don't? Do you have a skill that others don't have? Do you have a reputation, brand or existing market system that others cannot replicate? Do you have scale, technology, experience or other resources that others don't have?

A bad strategy is fluff and fails to face the challenge, it lacks the diagnosis. If you don't frame the challenge it is difficult to assess the quality of the strategy.

Another mistake is to treat goals as a strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. Good strategic objectives are the outcome of a strategy, not its input.

Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice.

Good strategy requires leaders who are willing to and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests.

Strategy is not mysterious. It is about solving the most important problem you are facing. You need to be focused on something doable and be consistent about it.