Hi, everyone. My name is Patrick you, and if
you want to be a tech lead or engineering manager, keep
listening, we cover the responsibilities, the
accountabilities, all the abilities, and even how you can
grow into that position from a developer or software engineer
position. Joining me today is Patrick, wha
who's been in the industry for about 20 plus years in various
roles CTO consultant and even Tech lead?
And he focuses now on mentorship coaching and trainings, which is
really cool. After all his links to socials
in the description below. He also has a newsletter Other
which I follow level up, it's there, check him out.
And with that being said, enjoy the episode.
I was wondering because I was going to go through this with
regards to the trainings that I did because you and I met about
a year ago and I followed one of your Tech lead trainings.
But since you also have that coach role for ctOS, is there
kind of a commonality in the problems that they face or are
struggling with that? You've noticed kind of a trend
throughout not so much. So a lot of this has to do with
the scope and roll. So, you know, a lot of the
technical leadership challenges will be the same.
But a CTO is going to have very different sort of challenges.
A lot of it has to do with sort of organizational things, right?
So, like, teams, this might be about hiring restructuring, or,
you know, about more senior leadership roles, what type of
skill sets or, you know, maybe they've got somebody, but it's
not quite what they need and like trying to navigate through
that. It's often about the
relationship with product and their CEO.
So quite different products, quite different set of problems
and because it's like ctOS. I also do VP of engineering.
So depends on the company, but the VP or CTO will typically
take things like org structure process.
Yeah. But sometimes with the CTO, then
it's also about things like, you know, if you're acquiring
another company, like how do you deal with?
Like different technology stacks and due diligence, lots of
different things? Things.
Very interesting very much. I think context-dependent then
for kind of the the vp's in the ctOS in that way is that there's
a lot more variety. That's correct.
Yeah, exactly. I mean I would save at A Team
level it's like there are still variety.
Yeah. But I think the types of
problems are very consistent what would be an example of like
the types of problems that are like rampant in there when it
comes to team structure? Like splitting teams like how
big you know we were. Is this actually the podcast or
is this? Like just warm up?
I don't know. I usually check after like, when
were editing what a good one to start would be all right.
Okay. I do, I kind of assumed that
you'd be like an intro. So there's no I record.
The intro. After our conversation, I put
that sorry, I should have. I should have said that.
All right, I was just like, have we started or is it?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different things so you know I
think one thing is it's like do decide if you want just a tech
lead and therefore, are they going to do the people
management so that sadly manager or do you hire two types of
roles like a tech lead, an engineering manager because
there's going to be some sort of interesting trade-offs for about
sort of side in terms of Team structures, and various things
like that. Then it's kind of a question of
like Yeah, like, when should you split or how big should teams
be? And, you know, it all really
depends. I don't, you know, the thing
that I do with ctOS is coach not Mentor.
Yeah, so a lot of the time I'm just helping them talk through
trade-offs and, you know, I expect them to sort of make
their decision at the end having taught through some of those
trade-offs because they ultimately go to own that
position. And if they're going to be
successful, they also have To go off and make it happen.
Whereas if you know, I think if somebody gives you an answer
you're generally not normally so, like committed to it to a
certain degree. Exactly.
So it's good to get some different perspectives and
that's kind of the things that we have when we have those
conversations. But, you know, I'm always going
back to. Okay, well, these are all the
things that you might sort of do, but like, what do you feel
is best like what do you think given all the constraints and
you know, they know People better locally and they know the
current context and where their organizations going.
So they're going to come up with a better decision that I could,
you know, without War context. Exactly.
Yeah. And your role is just to
basically help them throughout their thought process and
putting that on the table, it's kind of a sparring partner for
them to make the decision because ultimately, they are
responsible, they're accountable and they are in that rule and
they know the fixed. Absolutely.
I mean, to me, that's a good reminder about coaching.
Is that you? No, coach helps a person find
their own solution to solve their own problems.
Yeah. And as a technical person, like
I still have to do this as well is, you know, it's very natural
to want to solve problems. Yeah, to give advice to say
here's how I would do that and I, here's how I think you should
do it. But I think part of the art is
like, biting my tongue and to a certain degree and like catching
yourself before you say like you should do this in this moment
and I think that's the real art and skill of coaching.
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
I mean it's it's easier to solve the problem or to give advice in
that aspect but to allow someone to go through their own process.
Right? From a coaching perspective, it
requires a lot of time requires the right questions and allowing
for that space for the other person to come to the
conclusions. And I might be different than
yours but that doesn't matter in the end of the day.
Exactly. Yeah.
And it's, I think it's a habit. Like I often talk about with
both the technical leadership, training and hiring manager,
training people who come from that individual.
Contributor background that maker to multiplier mindset.
Yeah, and it's hard to turn off that make a habit of.
Like I have this problem. I want to solve it, right?
So exactly, yeah. I was actually going to hook
into that. Look at that, you could be a
great podcast host because my assumption would be exactly
that. That would be a problem.
Yeah, and I think it, I mean, when I followed the training
that was also what a lot of people struggled with, right?
Because they come from a role of technical excellence and they
want to take the next step and usually, that would be like a
tech lead. Roll an engineering manager role
or there's various options in there, but they want to take
that kind of background in the baggage, that they've built up
with them and they have, I mean, I wouldn't say problems with
that, but they do struggle with kind of delegating those
decisions and allowing the team to own that and not be a
bottleneck in that process. At least that's what I feel.
Like, no, I agree and I think, you know, I really believe that
everyone's trying to do a good job regardless of whatever they
do. Yeah.
And I think it's more More naivety or ignorance who lack of
knowing what they should be doing.
Because most people, I think, you know, both our Tech lead and
entering manager. They think.
Okay, I'm an engineer, I become senior engineer.
Like, what's my next step up? Yeah.
And so, I think, when they go a tech lead or an entry manager,
they like, well, it's more of like what I was doing before.
So, you know, it's more of like making decisions or solving more
complex, technical problems. And the thing I like to remind
people of which, Doesn't really happen.
When people find themselves in those roles is the expectation.
They shouldn't see it as that promotion, but it is actually a
very different role and it's a sidestep.
Yeah, so you're going to do different things, you should do
different things and you're going to need some new skills,
which you may not have built any experience in which means making
a lot of assets and that's scary for a lot of people.
And I think, you know, when you're doing something new, it's
kind of natural to kind of go back to what you're comfortable
with. Yeah.
Yeah, which then creates this sort of reinforcing cycle.
Exactly, I mean, if I look at those positions, with those
roles especially in my past it was interesting because I would
see like the pattern of going back to kind of the comfort
zone. But to me, if I think of my
position, and if I were to take that next step, one of the first
things I would do is kind of test.
What is expected of me and see if that aligns with kind of my
my vision of the job of the Ross roles and responsibilities there
because I did still think they're kind of cool.
It's dependent. But as soon as there's a
mismatch in there and it doesn't get addressed or acknowledged, I
think that's where it kind of the frustration builds up to a
point where you might be too late with that.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And I think a lot of people aren't really helps because they
you know, whoever puts them there.
So I guess from a Consulting perspective, if it's like
stuffing or from a sort of product perspective, somebody's
manager. Most people you know it's like a
quick conversation. Yeah.
Do you want to lead this team? Good.
Okay, great everybody really sit down.
Down and says, here's how you need to behave differently.
Yeah, like nobody has a very careful and that's one of the
reasons why I love the, the training support that I can
offer people because, you know, I don't get the timing.
Like I can't get people like literally in the moment, they
start in a new role. Yeah.
But you know, I think most people kind of go through that
realization either early on if they've been doing it for a
while, they're kind of like, ah, like this is why I've been
struggling and I encourage people particular when I do Is
private cohorts for companies to also send people who are
thinking about doing this in the future?
Yeah, because you know, we talked how a lot of these
require new skills and roles and if people are kind of aware of
that, they then have an opportunity to actually start
finding ways to practice before they find themselves in that
role having to use the skill. And so they actually have that
sort of earlier chance of actually building some skills
and experience without having to fail spectacularly because
they're now accountable for those responsibilities.
Yeah. Yeah.
Also let's let's zoom in on that because you mentioned the skills
that our Tech lead would require that are not normally or that
are bit more out there. When it comes to taking that
role in. There are different from kind of
the maker rolled the traditional developer software engineer.
What are the most ones that you see people don't acknowledge or
see initially? Yeah.
So I'll talk about one that you also mentioned earlier, which is
around delegating, right? So I think this is about like
involving other people. And this is also a really hard
thing for technical It is because, you know, most people
are used to sort of owning a problem, right?
Like that's kind of reinforced, by some language from people
around individual contribution, it's my thing my contribution,
and as a technical leader, you kind of have to give something
away. And you know, the sort of thing
that people enjoy often about that process, is kind of like,
oh, like I got to learn something by solving this
problem or by solving my particular way and You know,
both of mindset shift of saying, okay.
Well, now, I need to give other people the opportunity, but the
difficult part here is also is when you delegate, well, you
have to delegate the outcome, and you have to be comfortable.
Somebody may come up with a very different implementation and
that makes some people very uncomfortable, right?
It took me awhile as well to get to sort of maybe reframe it of
like I have the potential also to learn throughout the people,
how they Aperture problem very differently, right?
That's a good benefit. But initially, it's kind of
like, oh, like, no, that's not how I do it.
So it must be wrong, right? And then comes out those
tendencies that from other people's perspective, might be
considered like, micromanagement of like wanting to get involved
in a lot of the detail and that's one of those big
challenges of really sort of stepping back and focusing on
outcomes of trying to talk about, okay, what needs to be
done, what's the right level of quality and being comfortable?
Ooh, somebody will come up with a different implementation and
as long as the sort of quality aspects are sort of met it
shouldn't matter. So that's that's a real
challenge for a lot of technical leaders.
Yeah and discussions especially if you're in a big team those
discussions can take up so much time, so much overhead of the
rest of the team as well. Well, in the end, it doesn't
matter who's right, it really does, truly doesn't matter.
We're going to pick with option. A, if option b turns out to be
better, we can flip, and if option A is fine, then we'll The
you with option A. But I think a lot of people I
mean me myself, especially a few years back.
I used to describe myself as very stubborn but now I
acknowledge that it doesn't make any sense that I'm right.
If all everything I'm doing around, it is, is making it
worse for the team? Basically.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So maybe another thing that's actually difficult for a lot of
people transitioning into this and I do double down on this
particular for engineering managers, which is dealing with
people. Alright, like people, Things are
hard because, you know, there's this sort of saying that people
are like, snowflakes because snowflakes like unique.
Yeah. And that's also about, you know,
true about people. And I think, when people step
into a leadership or management role, they think, oh, well, you
know, everyone's like me. So I will treat them in my own
personal preferences. And this is the hard thing is,
you know, when you're dealing with all the different people
who each person is like a snowflake, you have to learn how
to do things very differently. In sort of accordance or
preferences to each of those individuals.
And so, that means that as a leader or a manager, you kind of
need to be quite flexible in how you do lots of different
activities, concrete example. All right, let's say that you
need to make a team announcement.
So I know that my personal preference is to write things
down because a I think it tends to be, you know, helps me sort
of go through that. But also I can read a lot
quicker than I can like listen to podcasts or watch videos and
Things like that. Yeah.
But you know some people will never read emails.
Like it annoys me. I understand like, there are
some people who are just really bad at reading emails, let alone
writing emails and, you know, for them, they they need to be
taught through, right? Maybe their personal
preferences, are they need to have that personal conversation
and that's okay. But, you know, if you're sort of
announcing something that means that you now have to do this, a
couple of different ways, it's not just a line to your own
personal preference. This, but to the preferences of
the team that you're leaving or managing as well.
And so, I think a, it's awareness that there are like
different ways more than, like, how you do things and be of
trying to sort of tailor and adapt it and, you know, sort of
dealing with the wonderful world that is people.
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, it's a difficult thing
to be aware of the things if you're kind of in your bubble
and you're doing your things and you think they're working, I
think one of the ways that you can get out of that is truly
just to ask. Back ask feedback and also
explain kind of your thought process, right?
Like this is the problem or this is what I'm trying to tackle and
these are the kind of my options and this is what I've picked
because people can then kind of think with you and give you
different alternatives for you to grow as a person.
You never going to step into that role and do it 100% of the
time perfectly. That's never gonna happen
actually. So you have to learn and grow
and allow yourself to grow in that way as well.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And I think that's the thing that you kind of really
highlighted there, which is like when you do People and
particularly like teams, you know, you never end up with like
the right solution. Yeah, there's no, like, right
thing that you can say objectively.
This is the thing that fits that problem space.
And so I think one of the difficulties is like a lot of
technical people, like a lot of certainty.
Yeah, but when you're dealing with people and particularly the
groups of people in a team you know like sometimes you're going
to have to like make decisions or help the team make a decision
that not everyone's going to be Be with, all right.
And that's a hard thing because then it means that you haven't
got that perfect solution and you may not ever have the time
to find it as well. Yeah, I think if you're in a
role like that and you are like involving more people and
interacting with more people. There's a few different types of
conversations that you're going to have delegating is one of
them and even saying, no to others is also one of them and
making a decision and being like, this is the way for now.
Let's see in adapt, along the way is a third one, and I think
that's probably numerous ones. But I think if you're in that
position, you need to be flexible enough and also
acknowledge which conversations you're good at and which ones
you still need to work on because you're just going to
have more types of different conversations.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And on top of that talking about conversations this is where I
would also add one of the big challenges for technical people
stepping to leadership and management roles is
communication. It's something that I've had to
coach a lot of technical leaders and managers on it's one of the
reasons I have a course on communication.
Like communicate like a CTO on the tech lead Academy because
it's such a foundational skill. And I think the reason it's
important is as technical leader or manager going to be
interacting with many other people from different parts of a
business. You know people who come from
marketing. I mean product is one that
everyone normally sort of works with yeah from like business
operations or like you know so CEO or MD and you know if you
start talking to all of those, People about like technical
implementations like, you know, using, I don't know Java spring
and like DACA and kubernetes. And, you know, we have lots of
tech debt and you know, I build is really slow, you're going to
lose a lot of people right there.
Like, I don't really understand what you're talking about.
I understand, what's important. What are you actually trying to
communicate? And that's a really hard skill
because most people are used to talking to other technical folk.
Yeah. And once again it's a very
underdeveloped skill for a lot of people that is going to
really Lee be necessary when you find yourself in those roles.
Yeah, I agree. I mean we laid out some of the
kind of roles and responsibilities which you might
not think of. But we you say you need to be
kind of comfortable or adequate before you step into that role
or even when is kind of the right step for you or someone in
their career to take that step in kind of gained a leadership
position or take leadership responsibilities in that way.
So I would, I would think about it.
So I mean, A firstly, everyone's a little bit different because
they all have different experiences and be what I would
sort of think about is like what sort of behavior am I already
seeing from people? That will help them be
successful technical leaders or managers and one of those
behaviors that I particularly look for, is this idea of so
proactivity. Yeah, you know of like going,
okay, something's not right. So So let me take that problem
and let me try to solve it and help.
The team get better at that because if I think about like
two categories of people, you sometimes have people that go,
you know, I want to be a tech lead.
I want to be a manager, you know, like in an individual
contributor a long time, I want to have this role, they give
you, lots of reasons behind that, but if they don't really
demonstrate that proactivity simply giving somebody a title,
doesn't turn them into proactive people.
Yeah. And you know, when they find
themselves in that role, this often going to be lots of things
that they don't take care of because they haven't built up
that skill and behavior. Whereas, if you're a sort of
proactive, sort of individual, that's what I think about as
like demonstrating leadership, a of like, spotting something and
improving something that you're already doing, to help multiply
people in your team. That's kind of effectively the
essence of what you have to do when you're in those leadership
roles, right? So I think about those sort of
two categories of, like, you have people that sometimes Seems
like point out problems and then they kind of like complain about
it, hoping that somebody else will do about it.
Yeah, that's not the bright Behavior.
It's that's not going to work when you're in a technical
leadership or management role because hey, that's now your
responsibility. You actually have to do
something about it because, you know, if you have people on
teams that already demonstrating that like, chances are they're
going to be a lot more successful when they get into
that role. Yeah, I really like that you
highlight that the role is and the title is just like a hat and
anyone can wear that hat. But someone actually needs to
Take on those responsibilities. And even I mean, the
accountability kind of comes with that row but you can still
take ownership of that as well, and those people will eventually
grow into those roles. You don't have to have the role
to take ownership and to do those responsibilities.
You can already be proactive in that way and do that.
But we do also then say, that kind of leadership positions are
not for everyone. No, no everyone is.
Yeah, and some people would like to Simply stay being a maker and
that's perfectly fine too you know.
I think it's important that we have a lot of people who can
focus on getting stuff done, I also see sort of any patterns on
it. Everyone wants to become a
leader manager, and I would just claim that a little bit is that,
you know, I think you can have multiple leaders on a team, but
I think it makes sense to have one formal technical leader.
Yeah, because I think it's important to make sure that
there is a decision-making sort of tiebreaker effectively, and
that needs to be done through a more formal Channel, you know?
Do you see with formal or good formal technical leaders?
Is that they do try to groom everyone to be a leader.
All right, this is about that proactivity again and you do
that by investing in psychological safety,
encouraging people to really step up and take ownership of
issues, which means as the formal leader, you're not
necessarily actively doing everything for the team.
The team becomes a bit more like a, what you might describe as a
self-empowered team of everyone. Taking care of things.
Yeah. And I like to then, think of the
formal technically do a bit more of a safety net, right.
Is that sometimes? What sometimes happens is the if
everyone owns something, nobody owns it.
Yeah and so somebody needs to make sure that everything that
is important is getting done and that's why there's, you know,
formal technical leaders is there's a sort of level of
accountability so but I don't think everyone has to you know,
necessarily want to become a formal technical leader because
because of that accountability. Some people don't want to
necessarily have that responsibility for other people
and that's a scary thing for some people and that's okay if
people do want to do that. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
I like that you highlight that, right?
The qualities that are in a leadership role.
You can still get and you can still hold on.
You don't need to have all the responsibility and the
accountability, right? But proactivity.
And that way is the quality and if that is inherent within the
members of a team, then it's going to be proactive team and a
proactive team is going to pick up things.
Things and discover new things that are going to help them
along the way and make the end product doesn't really matter
what your building but it's going to make the end product
and better as a result of that, which is really cool.
Absolutely. And when I think about other
good qualities of leaders is that, you know, everyone should
be growing the people that are leading.
Yeah, but also that's no. Does it exclude other individual
contributors from calling other people on the team like we all
learn from each other all the time through code reviews or
pair programming and through other people's experiences?
You do that. Anyway, it's just once again the
you're accountable to make sure it happens if you're a technical
leader. Yeah, yeah interesting.
I mean for me personally a few weeks back or you know, I think
it was last week I was asked like we're going to split the
team and do you want to be a tech leader door?
Do you see yourself in that role for that new team then and I had
a decision to make and I chose and I still don't know if that's
the right choice. But I said there's a person
that's better suited for me. So I want to be in that team
with them. So I I can learn from them and
kind of take those responsibilities, but at the
time I wasn't comfortable taking on that role.
Now, discussed it with a few people.
Even with my girlfriend and she was like I would have jumped on
it probably and then seeing how that went.
But I think there's numerous ways to go about that, right?
For me, being comfortable in a row and having those
responsibilities, I really wanna do honor to that role and the
accountability that comes with that.
So I think for me in a Personal Learning Journey, it's better if
I see someone that I trust within that position to then
learn from, and and kind of pull myself up from, But yeah.
You know I think you highlighted an important part here, which is
like a understanding what you want to do.
Yeah. Because most people don't write
most people are like doing it for often, external reasons like
it might be pay or compensation or like the I get to call myself
a tech lead. Yeah.
Once again they're often a romp reasons to wanna step into that
role because most of the time, those people will suck and their
team will suffer if they're doing it for the wrong reasons.
And you know, I think yourself, It's a, you know what I heard
there is it's like you want to have a good opportunity to learn
from somebody else and to to build up that skill and
experience that when you find yourself in that role you know
you can perhaps be a lot more confident and a lot of the new
skills that are necessary which will definitely help improve the
experience for a lot of people as well.
So, you know, I think that's a great thing because a it's like
self-awareness for you that you know, what you want to do and
you know, when you do step into that role You'll end up doing it
for the right reasons, which will then translate into a
better experience for you in that role as well as for
everyone else in that team as well.
Yeah. Yeah I hope.
I mean I don't really look and past decisions and be like, oh I
regret this. I regret that sometimes I do and
I think that's healthy as well because they strives to do
better, or allows me to strive, to do better in the future.
But for now I'm going to see how that plays out.
When I look at my career, I really have kind of two
passions, I guess. And a lot has to do with people
and a lot has to do with content creation.
And that's kind of how the podcast thing got rolling as
well. So I just foresee myself, either
moving towards devrel and developer advocacy, or more
towards doing more with people, which would be in my view, like
engineering manager in that way, Tech lead could be a step just
below that. So kind of threat towards that.
But what is kind of the relationship between a tech lead
and an engineering manager at what's the dynamic there?
I'm sorry. I mean, I'll say it really
depends on the organization because in some places they are
one in the same. So When I talk about injuring
managers, there are sort of five different archetypes.
I talked about and one of them is the template injury manager
and that's basically a person. So we talked previously about
sort of playing hats and it's a person who's kind of got both
hats on when, which is a tech lead and injuring manager.
So, they have to do both roles effectively.
Yeah. So that's the lead technical
discussions. They're generally a lot more
Hands-On, like literally writing code features and they're also
So then accountable for all the people management
responsibilities, now in some organizations, those two are
split. And so, you know, there might be
split because it's just how the organization runs.
It might be split because you know, there may be managing a
larger team and so it's often hard to be a really good Tech
lead manager with a large team particularly on a very complex
product to mean. And so if you split them, you
know, two people can then spend more time focusing on making
sure they do all of their Once police really well.
Yeah, whereas if you try to stick them all in one person
that person's probably going to end up burned couch with too
much context switching and just too many things to literally do.
So, you know, that might be another reason why some
organizations split interest, but where you do have that split
of a tech lead an interim manager?
The typical sort of line that I sort of see is that at lead is
yeah. Leading the team.
Technically. So this means, you know, as the
team Team is making significant architecture decisions.
You know might be about like pulling in a new partner for
external dependency that you're going to then be working with
for a long time may be a significant change to some of
the system design. You know, they're helping to
Shepherd the team's choices to make sure the team is making
good choices. And then also trying to make
sure that the team continues to remain productive because the
tech lead will often, you know, be able to support sort of That
slowed him down. Might be a slow CI build process
or, you know, they often have a lot more experience so they can
help the team. Maybe simplify some parts of the
system in order to sort of speed up feedback.
So they can continue to evolve a sort of system.
So they're very, very Hands-On from that side, working with the
team on technical quality, architecture design topics, this
often than means, the interim, manager forms.
What I would describe as a team. Lead injury manager, archetype,
yeah. And So they can really focus on
sort of the people and the sort of Team aspects.
So they'll be doing things. Like 12 ones, they'll be working
with each individual to define a personal growth plan to try to
find out how they can grow within the sort of environments
that the team of the organization can offer them,
they'll often be working on, you know, making sure that the team
are actually working as a team, and not just a bunch of
individuals. Yeah.
In that they get along with each other that they giving each
other feedback. Can a healthy way and they
deepen that sort of trust amongst the run which often
means you know making sure that the team sort of process or flow
is working. Well, so that everyone may be
having those difficult conversations up front so that
it can resolve issues and continue to build good
relationships. They can focus a lot on those
sorts of areas and then often also take care of a lot of the
what I'd say as organizational, bureaucracy, maybe processes You
know, status reporting in a, keeping planning going dealing
with budgeting or approval processes for team.
So that's often the the set of responsibilities that fall into
that interview mature. And so those two because they're
leading the team in different ways, they need to synchronize,
you know, they need to keep aligned is that, you know, the
tech lead will probably be working maybe with individuals a
lot more Hands-On. Yeah.
Because there may be literally working with people on a
specific feature and the interim manager will be having
conversations. Those people in one to ones as
well about worth and life what's holding the back and how they
you know, what support they need and the game, they're going to
get to the different pictures of how individuals and how the team
is working. So they need to synchronize if
they're going to keep aligned. And so that's a really important
part. If you do split, the sort of
rolls, I would also not say it's just those two anyone else.
Who's going to be code? Leading the team.
And another common role will be the product manager.
Yeah, so those three roles really need to keep
synchronized. In order for a team to be
effective. Interesting.
Yeah, I can really see why the rule would be split, right?
Especially if you have multiple teams in a big organization, you
would just spit those responsibilities.
And each person can then focus on kind of really honing that
responsibility and doing honor to that.
But exactly, as you say the engineering manager is going to
get a completely different perspective and they do have
skin in the game but not within that team and the tech lead
would have kind of skin in the game with that team
specifically. So the conversation is also
going to have kind of a different Malady.
There's a different hierarchy and a different responsibility
towards that person in that conversation.
So I also think that benefits kind of the end result in
helping the people within that team to allow them to grow,
right? Because you're going to get
different perspectives. Yes you do need to align but
you're going to get multiple puzzle pieces of the whole truth
I guess which is going to give you something and and what I
would say is that you know I keep emphasizing those two roles
need to be aligned and synchronized and I want to sort
of focus on like one Pitfall or trade off if you do slip them.
Yeah. Where people don't get along
right? Because I think one of the
challenges sometimes you have is sometimes you can get injured in
managers who aren't doing people management, like line reporting
in some organizations very important to.
And that's often like a organizational decision about
Led You people in a team report to its attacked lead.
Therefore they're doing like some of the people management
and therefore you still have a team lead type person, entering
manager, but Not responsible for people manager and then, you
know, there's the argument that the interim manager should have
this. Because the tech leads going to
be spending time with people as well.
Yeah. And sometimes that that Dynamic
can turn into an unhealthy Dynamic, right?
Because some people are like, well, only way of influencing
people is because I'm their manager, right.
Like I literally have a say in their review process.
Yeah. But you know, if you're working
well together, then they should be leading well through
influence in through healthy relationships, or trust.
Rather than just because I report To you and you're
deciding. If I get a promotion or a review
in the future, you know, that can turn into an unhealthy
discussion sometimes I can imagine, yeah.
I mean, hierarchy does that to the people in a group like my
manager sometimes asks like can you be completely transparent
with me? I'm like still my manager, so I
can say yes, but probably somewhere deep down.
I know, not, that's not true, that's them, the truth.
I give him and he respects that. But he also acknowledges that
mean hierarchies the thing, right?
We've established roles and responsibilities and they do
affect the way you You negate with someone and you can do
everything to do like everything in your power to kind of break
that. But it's always going to be in
place in the back of people's minds.
That's alright lately. Yeah, it is it is it can imagine
that I mean the roles and responsibilities that can fit
with one person but I am assuming if you do split it,
there's also going to be a conversation about what, what
lies where and it's very much going to be context-dependent.
But in my view, what we shouldn't like the goal, is to
make the team. Team and the people in that team
as effective as possible and allow them to grow and Thrive
within the organization, right? So also, you need to be choose
your battles in that way, and it's given take when it comes to
your own decisions. Because sometimes it's also, if
you have a leadership position I would assume.
It's not necessarily about you. It's more.
So about the people that you are responsible for and that should
then also be your main priority in your main focus.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And maybe something a little bit practical for some of the people
who are listening as well is that you know, you mentioned
that yeah you have. You have that conversation
around splitter responsibilities.
Yeah. And a good mental model.
I tend to think of is you have your team, right?
You have everyone working the team and then as a cool
leadership group you should consider them also as a team.
Yeah. And it could practice with any
team is to have conversations around expectations over roles
and responsibilities. Yeah, and so that's also
something that even if you have a template in entering manager,
people might go, yeah, I kind of get a sense about what you are
doing. At the beginning of working
together, it's healthy to sort of sit down and say like like
what level of involvement, like who should own this thing, you
know, who's accountable, who's responsible?
What's the, the type of style that would like, to sort of work
with each other? And on some of these activities,
do you like to do that thing too?
I like to do that thing to really make it explicit and
deliberate because I think where I see sometimes, a lot of
conflict is unnecessary. Yeah.
Because most people make assumptions.
Oh yeah. Well you know of course they're
going to Care of that or of course, that's my thing.
And then either one of two things happen is that the other
person is thinking the same thing and something either slips
through because they're assuming the other person will take care
of it or feels like they're treading on each other's toes
because that's like well, that's my responsibility.
Oh, that's my activity. Why are they doing it?
Yeah, and they're not sort of direct or upfront about having
that discussion. Yeah.
So make sure that you do sit down if you are in a sort of
power or a A split current leadership role.
I think of it as a mini sub team, where you should also
think of that. As going through the sort of
team formation process and set expectations, agree on, you know
what, how you'd like to work together as a mini School
leadership team. That's really important to going
to building healthy relationships.
Yeah. Yeah.
I like that you draw that comparison because those those
aspects you were mentioning I was like that really helps
forming a team, right? And in kind of a scrum team as
an example, you would go through that.
Right Through Fire, and probably through a lot of product
development in there. You would learn about what the
other person is responsible for takes accountability, for takes
ownership of, and you're going to tailor-make kind of your team
towards that or your personal approach in there to really come
out better as a team. And even if you are in a
leadership position, you have still people that you
collaborate with on a day-to-day basis.
So, for me if I'm in a product team and I look at kind of my
management layer, I expect them to work together as a team, and
it makes me really sad. If I don't see any aspects of
that, if someone is just working on their own soil.
Oh, and then don't really communicate and I notice that
they don't communicate like it. It, it's not as effective as it
should be. And you are a team even though
you don't really want to admit in that.
Absolutely. And, you know, I think that's
the thing which is like you have to invest in building a team.
You can't just assume like well, which were people together and
work well, but we're teaming up. All right?
It's like, it's it takes effort, right?
And energy and time. And if people are making that
time, Then you're kind of like hoping.
I hope is not necessarily a good strategy for building High
performing teams. Exactly.
I mean it's an interesting thing because when I'm in a team, one
of the things that really motivates me is of a team is
really effective. So even if I know we can be more
effective or more efficient, that's usually what I put my
focus and effort into. That's also all my stickies on a
retrospectives are about like we can do better because of this
and then we'll be more effective usually.
But when it comes to the actual responsibilities of
Effectiveness is, That like, within a leadership function or,
or a position in there, or is that more like ownership of the
team? Because I, I feel a high
responsibility towards that is because it's more of a personal
drive. But I don't know if that
responsibility should lie with someone else.
So you're a, I think you're I can sense.
That sense of like people are focused trying to help the team,
be a lot more effective. Yeah.
And you know, I could have mentioned that whoever is a
formal leader or manager for your team is very probably happy
to have. On the team.
I hope so because, you know, you care about like other people and
you're helping things work that way, you know.
And I think this is where it comes back down.
To me, this split between accountability and
responsibility. And the old saying, it depends
is that in an Ideal World. If we go back to this idea of
like a self-empowered, team, everyone at Team, should be
thinking about how they should be improving Effectiveness, like
yourself, right? Everyone should be piping up and
saying, hey, I think we could do this better.
Let's make it better. Let's okay, let's do.
This to make it better. And let's all work better at of
improving this that aspect. Yeah.
But what happens if it doesn't what happens if people in the
team, you know, they're just happy doing individual work but
you're not thinking about that, right?
And so that's one of the reasons why you have those formal
leaders that sort of safety net again, is that, you know,
somebody needs to focus on that. If you're going to help the team
become a lot more effective. And so that's where the
accountability comes. And this is the trickiness with
the leader is that you have to adapt.
Your style is that, you know, if we have Team of people like you
Patrick me as the former leader. I don't probably need to worry
about too much. Right.
Is that I can go back to maybe also being an individual
contributor because the team is taking care of a lot of
different things. But in a different parallel
universe, take a different team with different people.
You know that just focused on doing their own thing, not
thinking about how to improve their own work environment.
That's now on me as a leader to probably drive more of that
activity because it's not happening, sort of by default,
Fault in a tree and in order to improve the effectiveness of the
team, somebody needs to do it, but if nobody is doing it in the
team, that's what the sort of accountable leadership role is
therefore to help improve that. And yeah, that's that's kind of
the, it depends, but it really depends on the people in the
team and what is actually happening?
Yeah. Interesting.
When I zoom into your past because you've had like the
Rosen responded responsibilities of an engineering manager Tech
lead and CTO What was really the position where you were like,
God, this was like, really my thing, or I really felt at home
with kind of these responsibilities and
accountabilities. Well, it's a it's a hard
question because people grow. Yeah, right.
I think this is the hard thing is that a different parts of my
journey? You know like I wouldn't have
probably tried a different role if I didn't want to experiment
with something that's a good, you know.
I think the human side is I think it's called a hedonic at a
hedonic adaptation. Is that, you know, something
that brings us happiness. We, if we keep doing it, we kind
of get a bit bored because we adapt and, therefore, we need
like new things for a lot of people.
It's often about like a new type of program, or a new type of
tool to play around with. And if I go back in my career, I
remember one conversation with somebody.
I had at a pub, like, with all things weren't exactly and he
was like, oh, you know, well, I do is basically write something
that takes an XML one program and like, spits out XML for
another program. I'm kind of like that's kind of
all the programming. Really like might be a different
thing not XML. It's like Json or like an event
and you can do some stuff with it.
Maybe save it away for a while and then you kind of like you
know throw it out somewhere else for some of the system to Joe
that's got to be a sense of it, all right?
And like, you know, for some people like the how to do that
is like really interesting and fun but maybe like yourself who
kind of like well okay you know what?
The people element, that's kind of interesting, right?
Because there's a lot of to learn there and so, you know,
depends on the sort of background because people learn
and grow. And so to me, I, you know, I'm
not generally a long-term plan and I feel like, I think I have
some cool things I enjoy doing, right.
So, like, I helped enjoying growing people and you can do
that as an individual contributor.
You can do this at the tech leaders and interim manager as a
CTO what I do now, helping lots of ctOS, helping lots of people
through my training and workshops, And you know what,
maybe what was less important for me?
Was about maybe learning another programming language or another
sort of tool set. Yeah, because, you know, once
you've learnt a few programming languages, the next one's not
that different, to be honest. Okay, different syntax,
different, build tool, different, unit, testing
Frameworks, whatever. But like, it's still kind of the
same type of thing, right? So, you know, I think it's kind
of different, so it's hard for me to answer that one could
imagine. Because I think you know, like I
think That growth is nonlinear. It's like you kind of Wonder and
can happy for a bit, but because we're people that had Sonic
adaptation kicks in it, so I need you, I feel like I need to
do something different, right? And you kind of like and so
there's probably like snapshots of things like that over my
career but it's not like one point where I'm like, I'm frozen
and I have like found my spot in the universe for all of life.
Like I kind of try to say Never Say, Never because people change
people, learn people grow. Yeah.
I align with that a lot actually, I mean I laid out kind
of my career options now, and it's devrel and probably
engineering manager. But if you were to ask me a year
back or even two years back, I would have said scrum master.
I'm parked on her because I was all into that and I have, I
mean, I'm lucky that I'm in an organization where I get to try
out a lot of things. I think, especially when you are
a person that has kind of a broad interest and doesn't
exactly know where they want to head out yet, it's the best
organization to be in when you can try out like roles and
responsibilities with regard to those, Rolls that you kind of
aim for that you're interested in because also figuring out
what you want to do and figuring out what you don't want to do is
just as important because the more you figure out what you
don't want to do is going to get you closer to what you actually
do, want to do down the line and if you actually get to do that,
it's fine to then move on as well and be like our something
new and shiny. Let's let's see what that is.
Absolutely. And it kind of like what you
described them particularly about your environment is
important thing is that you do have lots of Knees to try
different things, but even if people aren't an opportunity
where you feel, there's a lot of different things.
Well, I find myself repeating quite a lot for people on Career
advice. I get a lot of asked about a lot
career particularly in Korea. Yeah, is I find it's not so
useful to say, what do you want to be?
And I'd rather sort of say, you know, what would you like to
perhaps do for say the next 6 or 12 months?
Yeah. And what I mean by that is like,
don't think about the role think about like the skill or
experience that Like to grow in and find ways that you can
practice, that skill of develop that skill and experience.
Because often that skill and experience will sort of you can
use that in other roles, just in different ways.
So as an example, you know, very early in my career, one of the
reasons I wrote like the retrospective handbook was
because I did a lot of facilitation.
Okay. Is that for me, it was an
interesting thing. I like a, I was really annoyed
at like poorly running. Yeah.
So like if I help facilitate it, Then we could be a lot more
effective. So there's like a personal
selfish reason but also, you know, there's a side benefit in
that other people don't have to sit through an effective
meetings and I was like, fascinated by that.
But I also wasn't like, I want to become well.
I mean, I didn't really think about it, but I didn't really
think I wouldn't become a full-time facilitator.
Yeah, yes. That's a skill and experience.
And, you know, when I was leading technical teams, it's
then a skill. I could bring with me, you know,
when you're dealing with very highly opinionated, technical
limitation is a very good skill. Absolutely.
And then similarly in a CTR role it's a great way of like
surfacing quite a voices and things like that.
And so that's what I find is really useful.
You know when you think about what you want to be it feels
like a non-reversible decision. Yeah.
It's like a decision that used to make it's like fully
committed. Certain Stone.
Exactly. And you know I think the thing
is if you focus on what you want to do or practice skill and
experience wise for a time period, you can change it again
in the future and you can probably use that in which have
a all you end up doing in the future.
Yeah, yeah, you love that. I've learned throughout this
podcast. That communication is a life
skill. And even though I'm not going to
do a technical, I'm not going to have a technical responsibility
throughout all my life. Communication is something that
I take with me. So the more life skills you can
cultivate, the more you can take with you also to New
Opportunities and jobs in there as well.
Absolutely, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Pat, I'm going to round it off here throughout your journey
with regards to leadership roles and even career advice in there
as well. Is there anything?
We miss that you still would like to share with our audience.
I think we've covered quite a lot.
Right? But you know, I think maybe if
there was anything, I was to reflect on our conversation
today, is it feels and maybe people don't know about these
sorts of two different ideas that you have a very strong
growth mindset. And so, you know, sometimes
there's such Terror of this fixed mindset of like what we
are, who we are and the in eight things that were born with.
And, you know, I think the things that I've learned over
the career that I felt is reflected a lot in our
conversation today is that, you know, by taking this growth
mindset, is that we all have ways that we can all grow.
You know, there are things that we can tap into that are maybe
are innate strengths. But there are also lots of
different dimensions that we always have some capacity to
grow and learn in as well. So, I love that final words.
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Cool. We're going to round it off.
Here everyone. I'm going to put all Pat's links
in the descriptions pack who are check him out.
Let him know you came from our show.
And with that being said, thank you for listening.
We'll see you on the next one.