I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...
Starting a family Three years ago, my wife and I decided to think about starting a family. The decision to start a family was not made like let’s do it. It was more of a reluctant, if it happens, it happens. Fast-forward about 18–24 months, 2 miscarriages, and numerous emotional roller coasters and pain, both physical and psychological, especially for my wife as I feel like women go through a lot compared to men during pregnancy, we finally had our baby. ...
Introduction A recent conversation with my cousin, who was moving to London, highlighted a concerning issue: an unconscious bias that made him prejudiced. What did they say that made me feel concerned? “I am not racist but when I got out of the station, I noticed that it was mostly people of x community walking around. I didn’t feel safe at all.” This is unconscious bias in action. And as this bias made my cousin feel unsafe among a community of people of a race, and is therefore discriminating against a race, it is racism. The technical term for this particular bias is Perception bias. ...
Conflicts are healthy Did the title of this section, set off alarm bells in your head? Maybe it depends on your experience with conflicts. In the early days of my career, I thought conflicts were unhealthy, and I used to get into conflicts a lot because as an engineer, I had my opinion on solving a problem a certain way. And obviously, my way was the best way because I had done my reading and compared other solutions and made my decision based on that research. However, there were many other alternative solutions that I hadn’t considered, simply because I wasn’t aware of them. But as an inexperienced, young engineer who was concerned about proving his point, I was blind to the better alternatives! ...
Background I grew up as a third culture kid, born in India and raised in the United Arab Emirates. At a very early age, I had encounters with some racist kids, often while in a school bus in the lane next to mine. This altered my perception of myself, created an inferiority complex when compared to the instigators of the racist incident, and I felt helpless and trapped. The problem in the UAE was not a lack of diversity. ...
Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager, you already have numerous responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad, and organization Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there. ...
Featured image: Photo of Group of Men Wearing Assorted Scarves Holding Sticks What is culture? You are probably tired of seeing this word mentioned in countless job descriptions and conversations in and outside your organisation. “That’s not the culture here.” Or “that’s our culture”. Or “we have a transparent culture”. Quite often this is just an abuse of the term culture. But because it is popular, it makes those making the claims feel like they work at a great organisation. ...
Featured image: Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels Preamble “Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” - Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson, 1999. That is an impressive definition and one that is easy to understand by anyone who reads it. ...
There will be a time in your career where you start to think, I have been doing what I’m assigned really well. I would like to do more. Maybe this time, I should lead people. What do you think you need, in order to start working on leadership? Attend a leadership course? Read a book? That is a good start. Wouldn’t it be great if there was one place where you could go to find out what you needed to become a good leader? ...
Are you a people leader, someone whose role involves a lot of influencing others to work towards objectives? Are you a mentor to someone who is at your level or junior whom you are helping navigate their career? Anyone in either of these roles will have conversations that help their coachee/mentee identify goals that matter to them, realise what needs to be done to get there, reflect on what and how they have been doing so far and to encourage them to get to their goals consistently. That is the role of a coach. This sounds like something that is relatively easy to do. But in my experience, it is not. ...