Be a Leader: Manage Up, Down, and Across Your Organization

To be a leader and a top-level developer, you need to understand leadership and be able to deal with your team and your managers. Having the skills to manage up – talking and negotiating with your boss, other managers, and executive directors; to manage down – inspiring your team and peers; and to manage across – reaching out to people inside and outside of your organization, will allow you to lead and have a larger impact inside your team and company, and also outside, in your communities.

In this chapter, you will learn how to be a leader. Even if you don’t have a leadership role, you will learn how to lead by serving and helping, listening and asking questions, inspiring people to take action, and using your leadership to build trust in the market.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• How to be a leader, even if you don’t have a leadership role
• Lead by serving...

Being a leader even if you don’t have a leadership role – take a leadership attitude

Do you need to have a leadership role to be a leader?

“A boss has the title, the leader has the people.”—Simon Sinek

One criterion for technical professionals to be considered for advancement is leadership. You may that leadership does not relate to technical careers, but you would be wrong. You are a leader. Even if you don’t have the official title of manager or team lead, you are a leader. You are the leader of your own career journey. In his bestselling leadership book The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins talks about the importance of your responsibility to manage yourself. Part of this responsibility is your relationship with your manager. If you want to progress toward senior levels of your technical career, you will need to be perceived as a leader. Senior developers may not have a team lead designation, but they are often expected to be a leader...

Leading by serving and helping – act as a leader in the team

As we talked about in previous chapters, building trust is essential to your career advancement. This is true, but once you build trust, you will need to further build upon that trust to take your career to the next level. You will need social capital or an emotional bank account with the people on your team.

Simon Sinek tells a story about the United States Navy SEALs – they are one of the highest performing organizations in the world. A former Navy SEAL was asked who made it through their selection process, called BUD/S. He said, “I can’t tell you who makes it but I can tell you the kind of people who don’t make it. The star college athletes and the tough guys with ripped muscles don’t make it through; the preening leaders who delegate everything don’t make it through. Some of the guys are skinny, scrawny, and shivering out of fear. When they are emotionally and physically...

Attracting top talent to your team

One thing that is tremendously valued and shows leadership in a team is the ability to conduct interviews and review the resumes of candidates.

Resumes should not be too limiting in scope but should be specific and focus on projects that were completed or collaborated on, not just jobs, certifications, and training/degrees. Ask candidates to reference stories and examples from their experiences, summarizing key points, facts, and solutions. If you are applying for a job, you should also have stories and examples for interviews. In an interview, ask candidates to demonstrate critical-thinking or problem-solving skills. One of the best ways to evaluate problem-solving is to check whether candidates can do the following:

• Break down the problem
• Realize it’s been done before in all likelihood, so do their research
• Recognize that issues/roadblocks will be normal
• Research services and tools
• Test solutions and debug

...

Leading by learning how to solicit and receive feedback

Leaders know they should give feedback but it is often avoided because it makes them feel uncomfortable. It brings up anxiety, fear, or criticism in many people. Think of feedback as sharing observations on work performance and behaviors. It can be positive or negative feedback, but if you view it as an opportunity to reward and praise good work or suggest improvements in a constructive way for the future, it can be an overall rewarding experience.

A key to soliciting and receiving feedback is learning how to listen and ask questions.

We talked about listening earlier in the book when we discussed public speaking. Listening is also key to leadership and feedback. And again, as we have said before in this book, you are responsible for your relationship with your management and, specifically, with your manager. You can lead this relationship with your management by asking questions and listening to the answers. This will provide...

Learning how to have difficult conversations

When you are interviewing team members, onboarding team members, giving and receiving feedback, and having peer-to-peer coaching sessions, you will need another skill in your leadership repertoire.

You will need to learn how to have difficult conversations. In the book Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, they lay out a framework for having these conversations and being successful with them. They call it How To Spot The Conversations That Are Keeping You From What You Want:

• Get unstuck: This is the law of crucial conversations. If you find yourself stuck, there is probably a conversation that you are either not having or you are having it and it is not going well. The first step is to identify where you are stuck and the second step is to unbundle it with the content (the problem), the pattern (a pattern of behavior over time), and the relationship (define how the problem affects...

Optimizing your presence – hybrid environments and global teams

Your presence will also impact how your leadership ability is perceived. Today, a lot of teams are remote, hybrid, distributed, or decentralized in some way. When teams are set up this way and accepted as the norm, we can forget about the value of “face time” or seeing each other’s faces. In the Face time still matters article from the Harvard Business Review, they discuss the current dynamic of hybrid and global teams. They offer the following advice and strategies for being intentional and even creative with deciding when and how to show your face:

• If you have the opportunity to go to an office to meet with colleagues, make those days about communication, whether it is individual meetings, group meetings, or just informal conversations. You will be able to make a greater leadership impact this way. Share the dates when you will be in the office to make yourself accessible to team members...

Using your leadership to build trust in the market – build visibility for you and your cause

The best senior developers have a basic technical foundation – not necessarily the best technical skills, but they have excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. They possess a deep understanding of projects that they work on, they have developed leadership and engineering management skills, and they are organized and efficient communicators.

Technical leaders are mature. They accept the reality of the market. Rather than thinking their solutions are always best, they realize that there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to do the same thing. They know that code will never run on the first try and testing, unit testing, automated testing, and debugging skills are highly valuable – not something to be handed off to another department or sent to another team for Quality Assurance (QA). They realize that 75-80% of software projects are brownfield maintenance...

Interviews

Victor Grazi

Q: Victor Grazi, thanks for meeting with me. I’m eager to hear your career story because I know you’ve had so much success in your career. Let’s start with you sharing a little bit about how you got started in your technical career and some of the things that you were doing when you first entered.

A: I’ve always been in love with technology.

Many years ago, we had a family factory: a linen business. We were delivering things per order. We’d get a cluster of orders, and somebody would go and pick out an order, and if anything needed to be manufactured, they’d go upstairs and they’d manufacture a few dozen of that order. I looked at this system and said, “Well, what are we doing here? We’re manufacturing little bits of this and little bits of that. They have these computers now that mean you can consolidate these things!”

So, we bought a computer, I learned Business Basic, and I...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to communicate for impact up, down, and across the organization, including how to take a leadership attitude, act as a leader in a team, act as a leader in the organization, how to cause transformation by helping people to take action, and how to build visibility for you and your cause. We also covered some tips for interviews and finding future job opportunities.

Next, let’s continue the discussion on making an impact on your technical career path by discussing how to make a plan to get involved in standards organizations, how to choose a few organizations to participate in to get started, how to join and participate in the process, how to bring the concerns of your company and team into the process, and how to find ways to get involved on a deeper level.