How to Lead Leaders

(This is a summary of the article Abstract Management Interfaces)

1. Challenge

Your organization is growing and you have multiple organizations/teams. How to ensure each team is successful and is aligned with the parent organization?

2. Solution

Create autonomous teams. Each team owns each strategy, structure, and resources while maintaining alignment with the organization.

3. How?

Set two types of recurring meetings. One with each team lead and one with your manager.

3.1 Review with your team lead

Internal Interface

• Engineers know what’s most important to work on
• Engineers know why the work they're doing is valuable/important
• Engineers know what done looks like
• Engineers have personal growth paths/plans
• Team is happy
• Team has a process to prioritize work (both features & tech debt)
• Team knows its stakeholders and what their needs are
• Team consistently strives to improve its processes and interactions
• Long term delivery plans are aligned with business needs

External Interface

• Stakeholders know how to learn what the team is currently working on
• Stakeholders know how to learn what the team plans to work on next
• Stakeholders know how to influence the team's plans
• Stakeholders know when to expect deliveries
• Stakeholders can expect high quality deliveries
• Long term delivery plans are aligned with business needs

3.2 Review with your manager

Supporting the business

• Engineering capacity matches business demand
• Engineering addressing highest business opportunities and pain points
• Fires are handled quickly and without significant impact to the business
• Consistently high engineering output velocity
• Engineering output is of high quality
• Other functions view engineering as a problem solving partner

Long-term sustainability

• Team score highly on annual company engagement survey
• We grow leaders within the teams (could person X go on vacation for a month?)
• Healthy/low rate of turnover (both internal transfers & company departures)
• Engineering output velocity does not decrease with age of products
• Cross-team dependencies (inbound & outbound) are tracked and resolved efficiently
• There are plans in place for eventually removing “toil tasks”

Alignment to company values

• Team members are active members of cross-company initiatives
• The team is a place people want to join and work (new-hires & internal transfers)
• We cultivate a team of amazing engineers
• Active culture of 30% feedback
• High bus factor across engineering systems and teams

Striving for improvement

• Issues and pain points are surfaced and addressed quickly
• Team consistently addresses root causes of systemic problems
• Team has a vision for how to support the business in 1+ years time
• Team has a roadmap for how to evolve their systems/solutions
• Team makes the organization & company better, not just themselves

4. Notes

It's important to note that high performing organization is the goal and not high performing teams. One practical mechanism to help with that is Relational Coordination (RC). The idea is to visualize the relationships between the teams in an org. Each relationship is scored on the following: shared purpose, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. It was created by Jody Hoffer Gittell, a professor at Brandies University.

Resources:

• TED talk (17 min)
• Workshop (42 min)
• Liberating Structure that helps facilitating RC