No Title Required: How Leadership Can Come From Anywhere
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Ruby Conference 201835 / 66
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CodeSign (mathematics)Continuous functionLine (geometry)NumberMultiplication signProcess (computing)Functional (mathematics)CodeCombinational logicData managementException handlingInheritance (object-oriented programming)Storage area networkSelf-organizationLevel (video gaming)Function (mathematics)QuicksortBitState observerFeedbackPosition operatorPhysical systemNichtlineares GleichungssystemMathematicsSoftware industryData conversionAnalytic continuationType theory1 (number)Raw image formatContext awarenessElectronic mailing listObservational studyDisk read-and-write headComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
Thanks for attending my RubyConf talk.
00:20
It's called No Title Required. How leadership can come from anywhere. So, why do we want to be leaders? I'll let that question settle in for a few seconds. Why do we want to be leaders? Money, right? Because leaders, they get stuff done,
00:41
and people who get stuff done, they sleep on beds of money, like this guy over here. So, if that's the reason you had in your head about why you want to be a leader, I say, great, and you'll be happy to know that there's nothing in this presentation that will try to convince you otherwise. Aside from money, however, we might want to be leaders
01:01
because leaders have outsized influence and notoriety in their professions. They give speeches, they influence lots of people, and they have huge, long lists of accomplishments. So, as you all might know, there have been countless studies and papers done trying to figure out what qualities these people have, and if regular people, like you and me,
01:21
can use these qualities to further our own careers. Now, statistically, we're not gonna be the next Bill Gates or Angela Merkel, most likely, yet we're still drawn to these types of people, and we want to be more like these types of people. Okay, cool, so I told you, basically, money and fame. So very Los Angeles, so shallow,
01:43
and so boring and obvious, right? So, I hope to show you that leadership is not just those two things, and I also hope to show you that leadership is, in fact, one of the most accessible things to us. So, my name is Jim Liu, and I'm an engineer at Gusto,
02:01
a payroll, HR, and benefits company in San Francisco. I've been in the software industry for almost a decade, and I've never had an official leadership-sounding title, like tech lead or engineering manager. So, rather than try to convince you that I have any leadership credentials or anything like that,
02:20
I'll start by telling you some initial thoughts on what I think leadership is and isn't. So, first and foremost, I think leadership is a personal journey. So, there's no such thing as a leadership equation. You can't plug in the number of years of experience you have, the number of lines of code you've written, the number of people you've mentored,
02:41
and get some leadership score. Likewise, there's nothing that says that leadership is reserved for anyone at any particular stage of their career. So, I think any conversation on leadership has to begin with the understanding that leadership is something really personal, and we have our own timelines and our own goals.
03:02
It's about people and not code. So, this took me a while to kind of resonate in my own head, but once I did, how I thought about leadership changed. So, there was one time I got a piece of feedback from my manager. He basically said, your work is fine, but how did it impact people? At the time, I was like, well, what does this question even mean?
03:20
Like, I checked the checkbox, I delivered the feature, I met my commitment, so why does it matter how what I did impacted others except for the person who did the code review, basically? So, as I kept just focusing on the code and ignoring everything else, I started to stagnate a little bit, and I made up all sorts of excuses in my head, like the review system is just bogus,
03:42
or the people who are yelling the loudest are the ones that are getting all these leadership positions. Eventually, I finally came around and realized that the most valuable resource of an organization isn't the code, it's the people, and if you have people in your organization who can positively influence a large group of people, those are actually the most valuable assets
04:01
in your organization. It's about the how and not just the what. So, think back to the best leaders you've encountered in your own lives. I'll bet it wasn't just the raw output or code that they produced, but how they did it and what it was like to interact with them. If you ask them a question,
04:22
did they impatiently tell you what to do, like a parent telling a child what to do, or did they sit down with you and mentor you so that their knowledge spreads throughout the organization? Do they build consensus? Do they celebrate wins? And do they push for improvement throughout the organization?
04:40
These are often called soft skills because they're not really related to anything technical. I've definitely brushed off soft skills before in the past, and you might have as well. But I actually think it's the combination of soft skills along with technical skills that really makes effective leadership. Okay, so we have some of my initial thoughts
05:01
on leadership, but can we define it? Can we put a definition around this term? This is actually pretty hard because there's so many definitions of leadership out there already, but I wanted something a little bit more specific to this particular context. So I came up with this. Leadership is the continuous practice of positive influence.
05:22
So let's break that down a little bit. I don't think leadership is some static milestone that you reach, and that's it, you're done. Leadership is something that continuously evolves as your company evolves and as you evolve. And again, kind of echoing back to my earlier point,
05:42
the most important output of a leader isn't code. It's positive influence for your team and your organization. So notice how this definition doesn't imply anything about your seniority, your title, or your job function. So because of that, I think leadership
06:01
can really come from anywhere. So here's what we're gonna talk about today. Move this mouse, which is very distracting, and it's not gonna move. Okay, there we go. Okay, so I'll give you a quick overview of my story and some of the leadership learnings I've had up until my career so far. We'll go through some of my own observations on leadership and finally some concrete things
06:22
you can do to become effective leaders in your organization. All right, so let's start at the beginning. The first job I got out of college was at Microsoft. I was doing QA on the Windows networking team. QA means quality assurance for people who don't know.
06:40
So I didn't realize at the time, but that first job was about executing a flywheel. So a flywheel's basically a series of steps that build off of one another and result in higher performance the more and more you do it. So I've listed flywheel up ahead, and this is basically just the loop that I kept iterating. You identify a problem, you fix a problem,
07:01
you try to prevent similar classroom problems, you then teach others, and then you repeat that process over and over again. So I think the beginning of any leadership journey is about honing the core skills of your profession, and I don't think you can really fake this for too long. So at Microsoft, it was all about steps one and two, just problem solving over and over again.
07:22
So during that time, I got what I considered to be my first leadership win. So at the time, we had an event called Think Week, where employees from across the company could submit papers to the executive team, and the executive team would read those papers. Some of those papers actually did end up becoming larger company initiatives. So I wrote on something called Microsoft Zune.
07:40
Show of hands, does anyone remember or know what Microsoft Zune is? Oh, cool, lots of people. Okay, so this was Microsoft's iPod competitor at the time. It didn't do so well, unfortunately. But so I wrote a paper on Zune. I was hoping Bill Gates would read it. They say he reads about a third of the papers. He didn't end up reading it, but another executive did and provided some comments.
08:02
So after I did that, it's a lot cool. I'm done with it, but my manager noticed my efforts, and I actually got my first promotion that year. So at the time, I'm pretty sure I was only excited about the promotion, but looking back, that was the first time I had done something impactful, no matter how small, kind of outside of my own domain.
08:21
So after a few years at Microsoft, went back to school to get a master's in computer science. And even in an academic setting, I got some good lessons on leadership. Okay, so show of hands. How many people have used this phrase in any professional setting? It doesn't matter. You could have said it, you could have thought it. It's like, this is my idea, I have this my idea.
08:41
Okay, cool, most of us. Okay, so I have a neat little story on this phrase in particular. So there was a startup weekend event, meaning people from the community would come together. We would all pitch different ideas, and we would form teams to try to come up with viable business plans over the weekend. When I pitched an idea, some people thought it was cool.
09:01
We formed a team around it, and even though we didn't come up with a viable business plan, it was still a really good experience. So during that event, a teammate came up to me and said, Jim, you're doing a pretty good job of leading the team, but I think you just stopped saying my idea all the time. We know it was your idea, and you're probably proud of it,
09:21
but we're all on the team now, and we all now have a say of how this idea needs to evolve. So that was a great piece of feedback, and an even greater lesson on leadership. Leaders often do come up with really great ideas, but the best leaders are the ones that know that when an idea is out there in the open amongst the team, it becomes everyone's,
09:41
and they know at that point they need to step back and let that idea evolve on its own. So fast forward after graduation, a few jobs to today in San Francisco, and I think the biggest difference between that first job and today, even beyond the technicals, just having a much stronger sense of where I am in my own career,
10:01
and what leadership is all about. So tangibly, there have been some good things that have happened, just in case you're thinking I'm just completely BSing you, being able to lead some engineering efforts end to end for various important projects. I got the chance to move to Denver, so that's Denver, for three months
10:20
to help ramp up an engineering team there. And finally, I felt comfortable enough to stretch out a little bit, and of course give this talk. Whoa, okay, that's not what I wanted to happen. Sneak preview of everything. All right, so, start with some of my own observations on leadership.
10:41
And obviously, a lot of this is informed by my own experiences, but hopefully these are transferable to you and resonate with you as well. And more importantly, these observations, excuse me, made me realize that a lot of these kind of constraints I had in my head about leadership weren't really constraints at all. Okay, so I'll start with title right off the bat.
11:02
So there's this interesting intersection of title and role and job function, and they're often conflated with one another. So if you really think about what title is, the only thing that title really does, it tells you what your functional role that you have in a company is. So think, you're a software engineer, or you're a program manager,
11:20
or you're a finance manager, et cetera, et cetera. As soon as you add seniority words, like you're a senior engineer now, or even like software engineer two, it's really easy for people to equate that with ability to lead. Now that ignores some dynamics of yes, we might want to advertise our seniority or whatever externally,
11:40
but think about what that does internally within your own company. I'd argue that we're all cognitively pretty lazy most of the time. So if we see a piece of email or any sort of communication that says senior on it, it's really easy for us to be primed at that point. So in the best case, we can overcome that and kind of give equal weight to ideas
12:01
coming from senior and junior engineers. But it's not always that easy, and it's really easy for us to be subconsciously influenced by a senior title and give more weight to their ideas in turn. So if you're one of those people that's like really tightly wedded to this notion of title, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I just want you to kind of ask yourself
12:21
and keep in mind this question of like, what do you really want that title to represent and imply about yourself? So this took me a little bit of time to understand, but the incentives and values of an organization really influenced, can really influence the type of leadership that bubbles up to the top.
12:41
So I used to think that like the loud, super opinionated person, authoritative person would always become the leader in an organization. Now if you look at the values and incentives of an organization, I highly doubt you'll see something that says, must be loud, must be authoritative, must be opinionated, and then boom, you're like a leader.
13:00
So these frameworks were created by humans, and humans, of course, are imperfect, and they probably just didn't consider other types of incentives and values that would be beneficial. So it's not like to say that those people were at fault. But in the absence of values like collaboration or mentorship, it's very likely that a certain style of leadership will end up bubbling up to the top.
13:22
So what does that mean for you? I think this is one of those, with great power comes great responsibility things. Like if you're a person who's already loud and authoritative and perhaps a leader, maybe there's no incentive for you to change your company values, because it's already working so well for you. But I think it's fairly clear
13:40
that there are lots of different leadership styles that are effective, and I think this is actually a great opportunity for different people across the company to work together to create a more inclusive set of incentives and values so that different types of leadership styles can flourish. All right, so this is an ideal progress chart, right? You steady up into the right, up into the right forever.
14:02
So obviously for any of us who have worked in industry for any little bit of time, you know this is completely not true. Like progress doesn't just happen steady up into the right. So I used to think that, oh, that just means I'm not good enough, or like only leaders have this curve, right? So, but then I observed some of the best leaders I saw and it seemed like there'd be times
14:20
when it didn't seem like they were doing anything super impactful. They were just doing normal day-to-day work. So I was like, oh, what's going on there? But during the times when you really needed their leadership, they would always seem to step up somehow. They always knew exactly what to do. So then I finally concluded, okay, this curve is just like, it's trash. Like it doesn't mean anything. And progress is, there's no such thing as a progress curve that looks like that.
14:41
It's always really bursty, with lots of different step functions along the way. So this happened to me, basically. I was working on a team, my current company, and doing normal routine day-to-day work, and all of a sudden, like a switch flipped in my head, and I connected two different parts of our system, and I kind of knew everything, how everything worked end to end.
15:01
And then at the same time, I coincidentally, I became known as like the subject matter expert in that area. No reason to expect that would have happened, but looking back, I think it was really just realizing that, yes, day-to-day work is what we're gonna experience most of the time. That's why they call it day-to-day work. But that's the type of work that gets us ready
15:20
to take the next step up in this progress. Okay, so if you're noticing a lack of progress, though, that doesn't necessarily mean you can be passive about leadership. Even the best managers can't be perfect advocates for us at all times. So we, as individuals, have to advocate for ourselves
15:42
as much as possible. So if you've done good work, and no one's seen it, that doesn't mean there's some, someone's against you. Like most of us are just focused on our own stuff most of the time, like that's the truth. So we genuinely could just have not noticed. So if you've done some good work, especially if there's some measurable impact around it,
16:00
be super direct and call it out. Chances are, people will acknowledge your efforts, and more than likely, they'll try to find what best practices you've used, and try to bring those best practices to their own teams. So don't allow yourself to fall into this trap and say this to yourself, like someone will notice my good work. I mean, it sometimes can happen,
16:21
but oftentimes, it doesn't, and not for any malicious reasons. And the best leaders are actually also the best advocates for themselves. And finally, observation around busy work. And I think we kind of all have a sense of what busy work is. It's like you're doing mundane code cleanup, or picking up the easiest issues off the backlog, or doing any sort of work that feels like
16:43
typing motion, some stuff shows up on the screen, but it doesn't really have any meaningful impact. So the best leaders, I've noticed, they always seem to have a good sense of, or an excellent sense, really, of what the best, most impactful work to be doing at any given time.
17:00
They never seem to get stuck with just doing busy work. Now, a lot of this is context and domain dependent, so busy work in one domain might actually be important work in another domain. But what I noticed was that this often means you say no a lot, very, very often, actually. And it's a really awkward feeling to say no. I think a lot of us, we wanna do good work,
17:21
we wanna help our teams, so saying no is actually a really hard thing to do sometimes. But the output that you wanna strive for is quality output, and not some arbitrary number of things that you've done to hit some metric. That's not what we're going for as leaders. Okay, cool.
17:40
So while these observations are maybe daunting, or perhaps super obvious, I think there's a lot we can do right now, concrete things we can do right now to become more effective leaders in our own organizations. So I hope each one of these things will, you'll notice that each one of these things can be continuously practiced. They can result in lots of positive influence
18:01
and are available to anyone, any location, whether you're a remote employee or an employee at headquarters, an experience level or any title that you might have. Okay, so that charismatic leader that I sort of implied earlier, the one who talks his way out of anything and inspires the troops, that's a great definition of a leader,
18:20
but I think the most underrated skill of a leader is actually listening. So what does listening do? It frees us up cognitively to be able to actually synthesize viewpoints from different people or written things that you have in front of you. It also gives you a chance to read the room in the situation. So in a meeting, for example, if you have a quiet employee who doesn't ever seem to get the chance to talk,
18:42
if you call on that person, ask them what they think, that has a tremendous, tremendous impact. It builds up their confidence level. It shows that they're present, that hey, this person exists, and chances are they'll actually have a really good idea also. So you can follow what I call Murphy's Law of Talking. If you feel like you've been talking too much, yes, you've definitely been talking too much,
19:02
so you can stop talking after that. So lots of effective techniques for starting to get to a culture of listening over just talking. Even small things like putting your phone away, putting your laptop away in meetings, that does quite a bit. We've used that to pretty good effect at my company right now.
19:22
And then you can do things like, for example, have someone literally delegate who can talk. Like if this person says you can talk, that's when you can talk. And you actually start with the person who's been at your company for the shortest amount of time rather than the person who's been there the longest or the most senior person. It can also use brainstorming techniques
19:41
from design principles. So rather than getting into a meeting and everyone just starts talking, you have everyone sit down in quiet introspection and write down ideas on post-it notes for like five minutes. After the end, everyone puts all their post-it notes on the whiteboard and the team's groups related sets of ideas to the other. And then finally, one person owns the related sets of ideas
20:01
and explains that to the entire group and you go around in a circle. So there's like plenty of other things you can probably potentially think of. But the point is that leaders don't find, don't just get the best out of themselves by just talking all the time. They find ways to get the best out of everyone in the room. So the best leaders,
20:20
they strive for continuous improvement. And you can't do that without an honest assessment of your own skills. So assessing your own skills doesn't mean comparing yourself to your peers. It means doing it as objectively as possible. So this doesn't have to be like scientifically rigorous in any way. For me, I just focus on two things. What am I good at?
20:40
And what do I want to improve? And notice how I didn't say what I'm not good at. It's like a small thing, but like if I say I'm not good at this, it really implies that it's a very static state. It's a fixed state. I can't get out of that. But if I say this is something I want to improve, that's much more dynamic. And it makes me feel like, oh, okay, I'm not good at this now, but if I work on it, I'll get better at it later.
21:01
Really, really small thing, but just like it helps me to like get in that right frame of mind. So when you do self-assessment, be honest, but also be kind. So for the honesty part, like acknowledge your gaps. We all have them. And even the best leaders, the most brilliant people in the world, they have things that they can improve on.
21:22
But at the same time, be kind. So if you have a long list of things you want to improve, that's okay. Let that sit for a while. Understand it, digest it, and don't try to tackle everything at once. So how I used to do this was I tried to remember everything I want to improve in my head.
21:41
And you can imagine how well that worked, which was not well at all. So pretty soon I started writing things down. That worked well for a while. And then I noticed, okay, I just have a huge long list of things, but they never got followed up on. So what's the point then of writing everything down? So here I enlisted the help of my manager.
22:02
And for me at least, I've never had luck with a reminder that says please do this by this date. It's just, you just clear the reminder and then okay, great, you're back into this state of a long list of things. So my manager and I, he proposed this thing called the monthly introspective, which I thought was pretty neat. So basically outside of your normal one-on-one,
22:21
we dedicate an hour every month to basically just talk about longer-term goals. So we talk about areas of success, areas of development. We put new action items for me to work on, and we follow up on old action items. This has been really helpful for me at least, just to keep me accountable, and to keep me accountable to basically,
22:41
I wrote this down. Okay, does this actually make sense? So this is the template that we use. You can see it's pretty straightforward and in many ways obvious. These are things you would probably already talk about in one-on-ones, and that's kind of the point actually. It's just to put a little bit of lightweight process around these conversations you're already having
23:00
to keep yourself accountable to the goals that you have. So feel free to try this out with your own manager or your own team. So feedback, one of the most important things about being a leader, but also one of the most difficult. If you think about what feedback requires, it requires a foundation of trust.
23:21
And the foundation of trust takes a really long time to build between humans basically. Really, really long time. So if you try to ask for feedback before that foundation of trust is in place, you're gonna get really generic feedback that is almost useless. So you're doing fine or you're doing great. That's effectively useless feedback. If you try to ask for critical feedback,
23:42
that's gonna end up even worse. So if you think about what critical feedback is, you're asking someone to say something negative about you, possibly in person. Now you might be a very rational, reasonable person and think you can handle that, but that person you're asking has no idea how you're gonna react. They might think you'll completely flip out if you give them any sort of negative feedback.
24:02
So oftentimes, they'll just lie. They'll just say, oh, you're doing fine. There's nothing you can do better, even though there might actually be something that you can improve. This is a really hard problem, like talking about feedback could be a talk just by itself. It takes a lot of iteration to get this right, and even then, it's usually not perfect.
24:21
But there are a lot of small things you can do right off the bat to kind of start fostering that feedback culture. One is to just give feedback and not like profound, earth-shattering feedback, small, good things that you notice your team doing. Give that feedback immediately as soon as you see it just to start building that feedback muscle. So once you build that muscle,
24:43
then work on making feedback really specific, regardless of whether it's given or received. So if I ask you, how's my communication versus how were the technical aspects of my presentation to the leadership team during our meeting last Tuesday? Okay, I think you can see that that second ask is gonna result in much more actionable
25:02
and concrete feedback. And then for giving feedback, there's something called the SBI framework, Situation, Behavior, and Impact, which we've used at our own company, which has been pretty good, and I have a link to that at the end. So finally, with feedback, you wanna set a good cadence for yourself, meaning you don't want your feedback to be so spread out
25:22
that you lose that habit of giving feedback, but not so close together that you can't actually act on the feedback and synthesize anything. The worst thing you can do is just wait until performance evaluations to start looking for feedback. You're just gonna end up with recency bias, because we can barely remember what happens probably a week earlier,
25:41
and let alone six months or a year in the past. So our favorite book as developers, copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. So whatever you're working on, you should dive deep. So as much as we love doing this, don't do this all the time.
26:02
So what does it mean to dive deep? It means to go from the top all the way to the bottom of the problem. So what does the top mean? The top means what is the customer problem you're trying to solve? Like what is the problem our customers, yeah, I just said that. What are the problems our customers are trying to solve? And all the way down to how does that get translated into code?
26:22
So as you do this, you'll probably notice lots of different things, lots of different layers of abstraction, first of all. So how does that customer requirement gets translated to a spec? How does that spec then get translated into code? And you'll probably also notice a lot of implicit assumptions about the way the system works, or just implicit assumptions about anything.
26:43
So the best leaders tease all of those apart, and they make them really, really explicit, preferably in written form so that they can be shared and commented on. So when you do that, not only will your team appreciate it, but the next 10 hires on your team
27:00
will also appreciate it because all that tribal knowledge, that hidden knowledge, those hidden assumptions become really, really obvious and clear. So I think kind of the great thing about software is that if you do software right, it really feels like magic. It's like this magic thing that just works. So that's a hint on how deep you need to go. So you should dive deep enough
27:21
to uncover the magic of the software for whatever problem you're trying to solve. So this has a lot of benefits, of course. From a knowledge standpoint, you're much more likely to build better systems and tools if you know exactly the implementation details of a function or how a particular function will behave under a different load, for example.
27:41
You'll notice design patterns that are shared across different domains, and you can take those best practices that people have learned already and bring them to your own designs. And finally, if you remember the flywheel, one of those steps is teaching others, and what better way to teach others than to actually know at a deep level how something works?
28:03
So here's some examples from my own work. The one on the left, we had a postmortem one time where a commit that yours truly made broke tests in development for about half a day. So we had a fairly good timeline of what happened, but I wanted to construct an accurate of a timeline as possible with enough detail so that we could try to prevent issues
28:21
like this in the future. So the summary of the issue was, there was some issue, it was a weird interaction between MySQL exclusive table locks and database cleanup strategies and the database cleaner gem that caused these tests to fail. So I'm not an expert in any of those, but the point of diving deep is not to be an expert.
28:42
It's to do that extra work to read the source code, read the documentation, set up a local repro, anything it takes to basically peel back that magic of software. And you can actually do this in non-technical ways too. So for example, I noticed my first wrote interview feedback, it was kind of eh.
29:01
It was just like very generic, and it wasn't really being, it wasn't really useful at all to make any meaningful hiring decisions. So again, no like magical formula. I'm not an expert on interviewing at all, but it's just figuring out, okay, what are the components that we're looking for in interviews? What do I need to get better at when I write my evaluations? And just doing them over and over again,
29:20
trying to do better every single time. And I'm not perfect right now, but I'm definitely better, and like I found that yes, I can do this, and the evaluations I'm writing right now are actually helping us make better holistic hiring decisions. So a little bit more on kind of non-technical leadership. Just want to like kind of reemphasize that the technical leadership part
29:42
of like specific projects we're doing, projects that we might do are super important, but there's a lot of non-technical ways to lead that are equally important. So the scenario we have in our head is like, okay, a project needs a tech lead, and maybe after some deliberation, a tech lead is chosen, and unfortunately, that person is not you.
30:00
So this happened to me, and yes, there were knowledge gaps that I needed to have, that I had, so I probably wasn't ready for that type of role yet. But looking back, I could have made a lot more impact if I realized that there are tons of things around shipping a successful software product beyond the technology that really make or break projects,
30:22
and each one of these, and a lot of these things are often pushed aside as like, oh, it's just extraneous process, or whatever, someone else will take care of this, but someone won't just take care of it. These all need dedicated leadership efforts. So here are some examples I've, here are some examples from my own career. So project management. Do you have a launch plan?
30:41
What are your stakeholder communications? And metrics. So all of these things are just for you to keep in mind that while technical leadership is obviously a huge component of a successful project, there are tons of other ways to have impact as well. So if you want to know how well you're doing in anything,
31:01
the best way is with unbiased data. So around metrics, you might actually be doing this already for product level metrics, but you can actually do this for leadership goals as well like measuring those. So measuring is part art and part science, and it's really easy to over-measure things
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or measure things that don't actually matter. So I always like to keep in mind two things when thinking about metrics. One is, is what I'm measuring going to tangibly impact the area I'm interested in? If not, then why even bother measuring it? And secondly, for the thing I'm measuring, are there clear signals of progress or lack of progress,
31:43
which is also equally useful. So okay, so you might have some quantitative metrics already or maybe you're thinking of some quantitative metrics. So don't forget the how as well. So the example is like, okay, let's say you crunched and you shipped something. Quantitatively, you succeeded. You shipped this thing on time.
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But how did you do it? Did you do this by yourself without consulting anyone and you left a trail of tech debt in your wake? Or did you have a really tight feedback loop with your stakeholders? Did you communicate effectively and did you write up a plan for how to handle tech debt? Now I'd argue that the second is better than the first,
32:21
but it really will depend on your particular circumstances. So the important thing to keep in mind is that leaders are aware of these trade-offs and they're aware that these trade-offs exist. So they'll keep in mind not just the quantitative what of the metric, but the how as well. So here's an example of how you might structure
32:40
your metrics. This is using Google's objectives and key results framework. This is not the only way to do it, but this is a popular way that I've seen done. So objectives you can think of as longer-term goals that you have. And the key results are the inputs of whether those goals succeed or not. So this is a sample of some of my own objectives
33:01
and key results. So the important thing to note about these key results is that the key results are unambiguous. Either I achieved 40% of stories contained front-end work in Q4 or I didn't, there's no middle ground. I either did it or I didn't. And also, even writing these down on paper where I can read them later is a great way
33:22
to just test myself to say, okay, do these actually make sense if I come back and read them again in a week? So a lot of these things like self-assessment, measuring, diving deep feedback, they feed nicely into each other. So you can imagine how self-assessment
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produces some things you can then measure and dive deep on and get feedback on. And then the results of those actions will inform the next sets of goals that you work on and the cycle repeats. So this is, again, a flywheel that you can use to, whoops, that you can use to further your leadership efforts. So this is just a reminder that all these things
34:01
that I talked about, they really are related to one another and you can use, you can basically use them together to great effect. Okay, so no matter what stage you're at, be a mentor. So especially if you wanna be a people manager at some point, this is gonna be a huge component of your job, so it's great to get practice on this as early as possible.
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New hires and interns especially are great candidates for mentors. They come in with a beginner's mind, so they don't have any of the assumptions that you have about your system or your processes that your tenured employees have. And their ideas, the best leaders will take those ideas to heart instead of just pushing them away and thinking, oh, it's just an intern or a mentor,
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so I don't need to pay attention to them. Lots of different types of mentors out there. I always try to find one with complementary skills which should be self-explanatory and also someone who's gonna be honest with me and not just tell me what I wanna hear. And the conservative mentorship I've often heard is like, oh, they're just gonna ask me all these questions and I'm not gonna have time for that.
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And I say, great, that's exactly the situation you want. If you think about what that means, that means someone trusts you enough that you have that knowledge and also trusts that you care enough to potentially answer your question. And if that's not the definition of being a leader, then I don't know what is. Okay, so last one.
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Take care of your physical and mental health. I think it's great that the stigma around mental health especially is starting to be lifted and it's okay to say out loud, hey, I need time for myself. The best leaders, they set examples for others and know when it's time to take a step back. For me at least, yeah, I can definitely feel this. It impacts my work quite a bit
35:40
if I don't focus on these things. Usually for me, a good weekend is enough, but you know yourself best and you know how long is enough to be refreshed. Focusing on physical and mental health also makes you more prepared to handle the times when you do need to potentially put in longer hours.
36:00
I put this last because this is really actually the foundation of everything if you think about it. If we don't have physical and mental health, then there's no way we can possibly tackle any of the other goals we have, the leadership or otherwise. So there's nothing too small you can do here. So if this is something that you feel like you need to focus on, no better time to start than now.
36:22
Okay, cool, so everything I said sounds pretty good, hopefully, so there's one limiting factor though. There's one thing that's gonna prevent us from reaching our goals. Does anyone know what it is? You can yell it out if you know what it is. Okay, I will tell you what it is.
36:40
It's time. Who has time for all that stuff I just talked about, right? No one has time for that. So okay, yes, time, our mortal friend and enemy or whatever you wanna call it, it rears its head again. So the best leaders, I wouldn't say they necessarily embrace time, but they're fully cognizant of time
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and the effects that it can have. So we might have a huge list of things that we might wanna focus on, and the best leaders know that yes, there will be unforeseen events in your company. There will be unforeseen events in your personal life. And your best plans, they will get derailed at some point. So if you think back to one of the first slides I had
37:23
about leadership being a personal journey, the best leaders embraced that fully and realized that it's a marathon to reach your goals and not a sprint. So you might think that after everything I said, you might think that leadership is just really inaccessible
37:41
given the constraints in your organization. You might think that you might wanna be a leader in an IC capacity, but your company equates leadership with people management, which is not the same thing at all. You might be a remote employee who has great ideas on process, but somehow all the interesting technical work gets assigned to people in headquarters.
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These are really hard problems and there are no easy answers. But that being said, I think we as employees should hold our organizations accountable for the environment and the culture that they set.
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Managers should not just empower us, or sorry, managers should empower us rather than just delegating to us. And they should celebrate small wins just as much as big ones. Organizations shouldn't think about leadership as this finite resource that has to be allocated to exactly the right people.
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Organizations should strive for a blameless culture so that employees actually aren't afraid to lead with new ideas. If you have hard conversations about diversity and belonging, they should be tackled head on rather than ignored. And finally, we as employees should insist that leadership isn't something where someone has to win
39:01
and then someone has to lose. Leadership isn't zero sum. So there's a lot that we can do as employees, but there's a lot our organizations can do as well to help us get there. So I want you to always keep that in mind. Organizations are there to help us along the way. So I wanna wrap by saying that the opportunity to talk
39:24
about this topic in particular was actually a pretty big surprise to me. There have been so many things that have been said about leadership, and what more could I possibly say, right? So this was hard to do this presentation, and then I said screw it, let's just write one thing down. Can I write one idea down on a piece of paper?
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After that, it got a little easier until finally I reached this presentation. And I think leadership is the same way. Don't try to climb that mountain all at once. Just start with one thing. One idea for process improvement on your team. One encouraging word to a colleague.
40:02
One more hour figuring out why that piece of gnarly code behaves just the way it does. And then go from there. If you start with one, then you'll be a leader. Thank you, and lead on.
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And put down some resources of some favorite books and blog posts and articles about leadership. And then if you wanna contact me, contact info is below, and I'll be up here for any questions that you might have. Thanks.