You're having an impact whether you mean to or not tech leads (No. 66)

The week we're focusing on impact as a TL or EM

Do you give any thought to the impact you’re making?

There are lots of ways to think about what you do as a TL or EM. Your day to day work consumes a lot of time, thinking, conversation, and possibly mental calories. That defect. How to develop X feature. This meeting that’s coming up. How we’re going to get this project done. That annoying guy down the hall. 

I think sometimes we let ourselves get lost in details and emphasize small things because, at best, we’re not sure what else to focus on, and, at worst, the details are a distraction from the big things that make us uncomfortable.

This week let’s talk about aiming higher. 

This week I’m going to argue that impact is the most important thing you should focus on as tech lead. Once you know how to make an impact, pretty much everything good in your career follows from your ability to have an impact. 

It’s also good for focusing you on what matters and away from distractions, which is a incredibly important skill as you move up—whether you want to climb the technical or management ladder. CTOs are highly impactful. Senior directors are too. 

It’s Monday, so let’s pull the gloves off: if you’re not focusing on your impact, what are you focusing on anyway? The task at hand? Getting through the day? Getting bogged down in minute technical details that aren’t going to move any needles anywhere? (Of note, I’m not claiming to be perfect in this regard!)

If you aren’t intentional about your impact, you can’t complain about where your life takes you. If you want to drive the bus of your life, you must be own your impact. (Forbes)

Why are you even reading this email?

This is probably a good time to give you a periodic reminder to make sure you’re reading the right email today.

If you just want a job, just want punch a clock, or you’re just trying to figure out how to get through the day with the least fuss, then you should go ahead and unsubscribe now because I’m not your guy and I’m surprised you’re even reading this in the first place.

But if you’re still with me, and you didn’t hit unsubscribe, then you are the tech lead I thought you were: you are looking for a way to make an impact, whether that impact is on your team, your technology, or both. 

What does impact mean?

We’ve talked about impact a few times here. For me, the easiest definition of impact comes straight from the dictionary. 

the force of impression of one thing on another: a significant or major effect

That can be you. You can be the force that leaves an impression or “significant or major effect” on something, someone, or a whole organization or team.

I think there are three different ways to think about impact. The first two come from the source or motivation, the last is the style of impact.

You might have a strong internal motivation for wanting to make an impact or being known as someone who’s impactful. Some of you learned early on how satisfying it is to know that something you said or did caused some kind of effect or change. Not only is that good and healthy (to a point), it’s critical to be successful. 

In other cases, your motivation for having an impact has been given to you by someone else. For example, your manager might have told you to lead a project, a feature, or do something like upgrading a database. (“Hey tech lead, I need you to lead something for me,” they might say.)

When you get this kind of top down requirement without the internal motivation, it can be hard to be effective—really hard—however. 

Finally, there’s something I almost never talk about and won’t this week: what kind of impact you make. If you Google much about leadership, you’re going to notice that a lot of people have a whole lot of opinions about what kind of leadership you should be engaging in—what values should be driving your leadership. I’m sure a lot of these folks have valid, if sometimes conflicting, points.

But in my mind, that’s up to you. I hope you’re bringing the right values to your leadership, but who am I to tell you what your values should be.

Whether you want to or not, you’re already having an impact

All of us influence the people around us all the time. Whether it’s how you drive to work, the smile you give to someone on the street, or, most importantly for this letter, your attitude and how you showed up at work today. 

If you’re callous, careless, or not listening to your team, you’re going to have a negative impact even though you might defensively say, “but I didn’t do anything.”

Especially as a tech lead or EM, the people on your team are going to pay close attention to the things you say, don’t say, do, or don’t do. They are judging you and judging themselves in relation to you and the rest of the team.

So you’re going to have an impact, whether you mean to or not. 

And that’s really the simple lesson for today. Not to make you paranoid, but to make you aware that what you say, don’t say, do, or don’t do has an impact. All I want you to do until we talk again on Wednesday is to try to become more aware of it. 

For the rest of the week, we’ll talk about how to really scale up your impact. On Wednesday, we’ll talk about how to scale up your impact with the folks on your team. On Friday, we’ll talk about how to scale up your technical impact. 

Thanks for tuning in this week tech leads!

-michael