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.
What does it say?
Let’s start with numbers. If you have a team of 5-7 direct reports. And all of you are focusing on the same problem space, you have a lot going on in sync for you. It does feel like a team - with shared objectives and all.
You probably spend a lot of time with your team and know your team members at a personal level. You could take time to celebrate moments like birthdays and other life events as you directly know what’s going on in their lives.
As the number of direct reports grow, you see all of them less often. You have to, in order to budget your time. You start thinking about leading indirectly. Who could I get as leaders who can look after a subgroup? I consider my Tech Leads as people who are embedded in a team working closely with all the other engineers in the team to be the glue of the team. I trust them with the responsibility of dealing with the day to day, always letting them know that they can use me for prioritisation discussions, escalations, etc.
This trusting someone else or a group of others, was new to me as a leader who was only used to leading a small team with all the technical expertise needed to lead them. And it made me uncomfortable and excited at the same time. But I learned through reading a lot and speaking to other leaders that it was the only way I could lead effectively, i.e. by growing other leaders!
You are not the person you were
Getting candid feedback from your team members now get even harder. I struggle to get feedback for my blind spots from my team. I have to repeatedly ask directly or ask via my manager. The fact that even though I was a trusted member of the team, I am no longer within the team - created a little discomfort. Although I strived to build excellent rapport with every one in the team, receiving candid feedback was hard.
This was particularly evident when scaling an offshore team with a partner firm. I am responsible for the people there too. However, I lead through a project manager offshore and every time we run retrospectives, the room is awfully quiet :D. This is despite my attempts at appearing in as many of those team meetings and expressing support and praise for their performance and contributions.
I believe this is because of the distance and the feeling of a power imbalance. Thus, the approach I use is to iterate that I need feedback to lead better. I also ensure that I give my team the option of giving me feedback indirectly via my manager - this does help a lot, if your team is comfortable sharing candid feedback to your manager who would request them formally though some performance management software, or just a form that would be awesome.
I wish it hadn’t come to this. But it was meant to be. There is going to be distance. This is the whole point of having employee engagement surveys anonymously.
Too many context switches
I remember the days when I was solely responsible for one team that owned one application. Looking back now, that felt like such an easy thing to do. My head didn’t have to spin when trying to retrieve information. At Kaluza, I not only manage the teams, but I am also responsible for projects that are related to my teams, but not necessarily things that my teams are actively working on. So the number of ongoing activities that I have to keep track of, is extraordinarily high.
I particularly struggled with this when I became a parent. The reason being my baby girl doesn’t sleep much at night, and it has left both my wife and I with very little rest throughout. I sometimes wonder how long this will last, and I am still going through it. But it is definitely getting better - or at least seems like that. Without a well rested night, remembering things can become extremely hard. I cope by writing down things. This is probably a sign that I should probably hire more leaders to help, which I think we have - through a programme manager.
Prioritise Brutally
Yes, you read that right.
Be brutal with prioritisation. Choose where your energy is invested wisely.
Things will go wrong in certain parts at certain times. You cannot fix them all. The important thing to remember is you have people in the right place to work on improving those things for you.
I have made the mistake of trying to facilitate workshops for helping the team fix problems. And when it is one team it is fine. But when many teams have different sets of problems, it becomes impossible to fit in your schedule.
Delegate as much of these with purpose and intention. This helps empower the teams to be self-sufficient and also confident in making decisions.
People-centric skills matter the most
As you go higher in your career ladder, you start doing less of what you were an expert in. Julie sums it up well:
no CEO is an expert across sales and design, engineering and communications, finance and human resources. And yet, she is tasked with building and leading an organisation that does all of those things.
I love her pointer here on mastering these few skills:
- Hiring exceptional leaders
- Building self-reliant teams
- Establishing and communicating well
These have been my priorities too.
I don’t know who said it, but I firmly believe in it, and I have to say it here: I would rather have a hole than an asshole in my team or organisation.
Invest in an excellent hiring process. Especially when hiring leaders, as their impact is on a group of people, thus the higher their position, the more important it becomes to be thorough with hiring.