If you want to be a great tech lead, you'll start with listening! (No. 83)
This week we're going back to fundamentals and reviewing the Four Core, starting with listening. Gonna be a good week, tech leads.
Hey tech leads,
Happy Monday. We’re doing the fundamentals again.
Again?!? Hell yeah.
As I mentioned last week, I’m trying to reconnect strongly with my purpose for sending these letters. Writing to you is, in a lot of ways, a hobby after all. It used to be about making ME feel like I was doing something to give back.
But feeling valuable and being valuable aren’t necessarily the same thing, are they? I’d love to connect the two; so I ACTUALLY want to start making sure I’m doing something useful for you.
I want you to be a great tech lead. Even more, I want you to want to be one. I’m absolutely not the only path for you to get there, but I want to be one path, or at least a source of motivation.
We aren’t trying to be great tech leads, or not enough of us
Seeking to be a great tech lead isn’t something our industry does much. If you go looking around for how to be a great tech lead, you might come across a handful of posts on Medium or dev.to, or maybe even run across my list and the stuff I’ve been doing. The fact that there’s few products highly suggests that there’s very little demand for people trying to figure this out.
That makes you very special, of course, because I think you actually want to be a great tech lead. We absolutely need more great tech leads. So much of what’s wrong in technology can be attributed to weakness at the tech lead front lines.
Consequently, you’re damn straight we’re going over the fundamentals again. Greatness, in anything, is usually a simple matter of mastering the fundamentals. Mastering them means practicing them. Rehearsing them. Refocusing on them. Iterating on them. Again and again. They aren’t a box to check; fundamentals are a way of life.
The Four Core: An overview
The Four Core are a set of four capabilities I defined a while ago based on what I’ve seen successful tech leads do over the years. I say “capabilities” because I didn’t want to give you a laundry list of things to do or don’t do. That’s too unworkable in practice.
The Four Core are the four capabilities that make up, say, 20% of the things you need to do as a tech lead. But they easily drive 80% of the results you need in your role.
You might wonder: Why four? Why not five? Or three? Why these four? Seems kind of like a random list…? All fair concerns. My only response is to ask you to trust me and try them for yourself. Do what works for you.
Time and time again I’ve watched folks succeed and fail, and these four seem to the consistent capabilities great leads have. Indeed, even the best tech leads I’ve seen struggle to exhibit all four, even though they are only four.
The first is listening, which we’re going to explore today. Capability No. 2 is what I traditionally call a “bias for action” or “showing up.” But I think I might just rename it to work ethic, which we talked about last week. The basic idea is that the world is chock full of smart people who accomplish little. Being smart is a necessary, but insufficient, condition to becoming a great tech lead.
The next two are vision crafting (Capability No. 3) and tracking and adjusting (Capability No. 4). Vision crafting means putting together a clear vision for the work, giving your team some sense of purpose for what they’re doing—even just a little goes a long way. Next is tracking and adjusting, which means you’re effectively keeping track of how well the team is doing and making adjustments where they’re needed, which is actually far harder for tech leads than it sounds.
Let’s start with listening
I always like to start with listening. Why?
You can’t lead without communicating. I know I’m stating the obvious, but communication is an absolute prerequisite to leadership. You cannot lead without communicating, in some form. It’s like trying to compute without electricity.
Most tech leads that I know are pretty good at speaking up or articulating a point of view on things. The problem is usually that that they’re doing so without having fully heard the rest of the team.
All the data you need to lead comes from listening. Everything you need to know about your tech lead role is right in front of you, if you would ask and listen more to everyone.
If you try to lead without listening, your odds of getting your leadership directionally correct are 100% random. If you haven’t heard what’s being said, then maybe you’ll nail it. Maybe you won’t. Who knows?
Listening is a prerequisite to influence. Truth be told, leadership IS influence. Leading means creating followers who take action because of your influence (stepping into leadership moments to do so, by the way). I just don’t get into this often because it’s too abstract to be helpful to you as a new tech lead. But you’re more likely to influence people if they felt heard than if you’re not listening.
Listening means, roughly, gathering the right amount of data in the moment from everyone around you. With all the Four Core, there are maturities. By maturity, I mean how mature you are in the skill itself, not your age or experience. Maturity, in anything, does not come automatically with age or experience.
At the beginner level, you are either not listening or you’re hearing only content. Or you’re only hearing what you want to hear. We all do this from time to time. The goal is to notice you’re at this level and do better if the moment requires it.
At the intermediate level, you’re starting to get richer data. You’re starting to read body language. You’re starting to understand the context of the person doing the communicating. Everyone knows they need to do this. Common knowledge isn’t common practice, however.
Many of us are working a lot more remotely, so I was thinking about non-verbals in remote work. You can find non-verbals here too. Even on Slack there’s a certain amount of nonverbal communication available. For example, there’s the reply speed. Or the times when it seems like someone is typing forever, but at the end of 60 seconds of “So and so is typing,” you get a one-word answer. Obviously, you need to dig a little deeper. Add that anything you know about where they are or what they’re doing… in a meeting? With a customer? In an important meeting?
The non-verbal signals and context clues are everywhere—you just need to seek them out and syntheize them.
The advanced level of listening is when you’re actually able to step into someone else’s shoes. I call this empathic listening, but the minute I use the word “empathic,” I start backpedaling. Empathy is a big word, so all I want for you, at this point in your career anyway, is to start getting out of your head and into theirs. This level of listening is most critical to do when someone on your team has something important they need to be express, which is more often than I think you think it does.
It’s hard to be an empathic listener. The reason why leads me to the biggest blocker to listening that we all have: we need to get over ourselves to truly hear another person, at least for a minute.
Being self-absorbed is obviously annoying at a dinner party, but we might not notice we’re doing it at work when we’re absorbed with the pressures and demands of our projects and the technology swirling in our heads. You need to find a way to put everything aside for a moment to truly hear someone at an advanced, empathic level.
Finally, it’s hard to be on the advanced level with all the people all the time. It takes real hard work to get to that level with anyone, let alone consistently. But knowing when to invest the energy and the hard work of listening means your capabilities are expanding, and that’s what we’re talking about this week.
It’s Monday tech leads! Three more of the Four Core coming the rest of the week. Stay tuned……
Thanks for reading!
The Tech Lead Coaching email list and podcast are written and recorded by Michael Rice to bring more clarity, certainty, and confidence to my tech leads.
Tips? Have something you’d like me to cover or someone you want to me talk about? Drop me an email to me@michaelrice.com. Hope you will. 🤞
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