Make an impact on your team tech leads! (No. 67)

When you get into lead roles, there are so many ways to make an impact

Tech Leads,

First of all, sorry I’m sending this out a bit late on Wednesday night. Since when did Halloween in America become such a time consuming thing? The holiday isn’t even until tomorrow!

On Monday, I told you that you’re going to have an impact as a tech lead whether you mean to or not—whether you consciously do it, unconsciously do it, or do impact your team or organization negligently.

Today, we’re going to zoom in on some ways you can deliberately, consciously have an impact on your team. Coming soon, on Friday, we’ll shift the focus to having an impact on the technology or product. 

We’re talking about impact this week

Impact is what you think it is, tech leads!

It simply means changing, bending, altering, breaking, or improving something as a result of your actions or from something you’ve done or put into motion through your communication as a leader. Send an email asking for something to change? You might have cause an impact through a change in direction. A hallway conversation saying you really like something, and you might have an impact on that individual. 

The harder question for you this this week is: are you being intentional about having an impact?

Specifically, today we’re going to focus on ways that you can—intentionally—have an impact on your team or your organization. So specifically in this context, having an impact means that you are going to, through something you do, change the way the team or organization works or interacts, which results in a different kind of output from the team.

(And remember, as a tech lead or EM, your product is your team, and your team produces the product.)

How to have an impact on the team

Here are a few of the ways I think you can have an impact on the team. Any one of them could be an entire week’s topic all by itself, so let’s just summary or tease some ideas.

First, you can introduce structural or process changes to the team. For example, you might lead a change to a different git branching strategy, code review process, or way of allocating work through Issues, among a million other possibilities. As analytical people and, generally, systems-oriented thinkers, many of us tend to be attracted to processes and systems as solutions to most problems. They can work, but I think their usefulness can be a bit limited if the underlying culture doesn’t change to align to the process.

So another approach is to try to impact the team by introducing behavioral changes to influence your team’s culture. To cite one of countless possibilities, you could try to introduce more safety on the team to unlock more creativity. Or you could look to increase engagement on the team. Or, you might try to actually decrease engagement to give folks more space to focus. Only you and your team will know what’s right for you.

You could also seek to change the team’s focus. On Monday I challenged you by asking what you were focusing on if you weren’t focusing on impact. What could be more important than impact?

So what is your team focusing on right now, anyway? Organizational noise? Gaming some kind of internal agile process? Dunking on political points on another team?

Probably not the impact we should be focused on. So what would you rather have them focused on? True velocity? Shipping code? Quality? Craftsmanship? As a lead, the team is largely going to look to you to set the vision and focus the team. So tell me where you want them to focus.

You can build the team’s self-identity. A lot of teams—maybe most—are only “teams” in name. Too often, they’re just a collection of individuals with no true sense of identity. But as a lead or manager, you can bring the team together under some kind of shared identity or purpose. Some of you are naturally good at this. Others will need to work on it, like I did (and continue to).

Speaking of individuals, maybe you want to have a bigger impact on the individuals on the team rather than the team itself. There are lots of ways to impact individuals. You could have a strong force of personality. You could have charisma. You could be warm, supporting, empathic even. You could be deeply engaging. Or you might be none of those things and you might be able to impact and influence individuals quietly through close one on one conversations and taking a lot of interest in what they’re doing and who they are. You don’t have to be a “people person” to do the latter. You just have to give a crap about it.

Or, maybe your focus is on making an impact on the organization itself, outside of just your team (or maybe in addition to). Maybe you want to change the focus, self-identity, processes, or behavior of the broader organization. In some companies this might be hard; in others, this kind of impact is attainable.

Finally, remember you can mix, match, and combine any of the ideas above. Indeed, when you combine them, the effect might be a lot stronger than trying to have an impact by focusing on any one of those ideas. 

Almost done with the week tech leads. Finish strong!

-michael