5 must-have resources for technical leaders
Project Oxygen
“Great managers still matter”
One of the first resources you should check out is project oxygen by Google, which looks at the qualities of the best managers. Interestingly enough, the original purpose of the study was for Google to prove that managers had little impact and the headcount could be spent on more engineers instead. What they discovered is that a good team leader is one of the most important factors for a successful team.
There are 10 different qualities, such as being a good coach and a strong decision-maker. At Google, they took this research and turned it into their ‘Manager Feedback Survey’. This survey is filled in by all the direct reports of a manager twice a year, which gives them a score on how well they are lining up to these 10 qualities. Managers are then encouraged to share these results with their team and take active steps to improve on them.
As well as the project itself, the re:Work website by Google, in general, has some great resources for managers and leaders. These are broken down into different areas, such as goal setting and hiring.
Atlassian Team Playbook
This is a huge resource of lots of different ‘plays’ you can use to deal with situations you might find yourself in as a technical leader. It was put together by Atlassian, who describe it as their…
“no-buillshit guide to unleashing your team’s potential”.
You can find the usual things you might be familiar with such as retrospectives and the 5 whys analysis, as well as processes unique to Atlassian. There are also some great plays around making decisions, project management and understanding your team better. One I was surprised to see, which is a growing trend in silicon valley companies is ‘My User Manual’, also known as the ‘Manager README’, where you help your teammates understand how to best work with you. You can dip into this resource whenever you need to or work it into your process, by first using the health score every month and using the plays associated with the areas your team needs to improve on. I love this resource and use it all the time!
Project Aristotle
Another study from Google was project Aristotle, which looked at what were the qualities of their best performing teams. The results were, in order of importance:
- Psychological safety
- Dependability
- Structure and clarity
- Meaning
- Impact
Psychological safety is described as “Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other” and is the number one reason. You might have expected to see something like the ‘highest skilled’, but that doesn’t even make the top five. I think of this in a very simple way; you could have the most skilled people in the world, but if they are building the wrong thing, then they are not going to be performing very well in the eyes of the company.
Modern CTO (Podcast)
There is no better way to learn how to be a leader than to find a great mentor and learn everything you can. Unfortunately, not everyone has a manager who invests the time in them and so you have to go looking elsewhere. For you, I would say, check out the Modern CTO podcast. CTOs from top tech companies share their experience and top tips. Interviewees include people from Atlassian, GitHub, Reddit and Salesforce.
What you will notice after listening to a lot of different episodes is that there is definitely a common way of thinking and traits shared between these people. I found this to be incredibly illuminating and it helps me keep in touch of what different companies are doing all across the world.
The First 90 Days (Book)
This book lives up to its name as the ‘onboarding bible’. If you are starting a new role as a leader in a company, you need to read this book! It describes in a very practical way, how to hit the ground running within your first 90 days. To do this is has a ton of useful exercises to analyse your situation and refer back to when needed. It will guide you through the first 30 days, where it is critical you create a learning plan to make sure you are making informed decisions, rather than making bad decisions on a poor understanding of the company. It also points out a lot of mistakes that leaders can make when taking on a new role and highlights the importance of context and culture.
This book is also a very useful resource for onboarding new team members and creating a 90-day plan for them. I use this approach on my teams and it not only gets people up to speed quicker but creates a greater level of trust from your staff by demonstrating you care about their experience and progression.
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About
Matthew Bill is a passionate technical leader and agile enthusiast from the UK. He enjoys disrupting the status quo to bring about transformational change and technical excellence. With a strong technical background in Polyglot Software Engineering, he solves complex problems by using innovative solutions and excels in implementing strong DevOps cultures.
He is an active member of the tech community, writing articles, presenting talks, contributing to open source and co-founding the Norwich Node User Group. If you would like him to speak at one of your conferences or write a piece for your publication, then please get in touch.
Find out more about Matthew and his projects at matthewbill.gihthub.io.
Thanks for reading!
