Every leader or manager should be armed with multiple tools to help them in both the day-to-day job and the long-term journey of building teams and achieving goals. In this article, I will talk about two of the essential tools for leadership, in my opinion – trust and autonomy in the context of leading teams and people management.
Trust
We are humans, and trust has to be deserved for most of us, and it is really easy to lose it. This is natural, but in a professional environment, what does it mean? Would you secretly check if a new joiner did everything as they were asked to do? Would you ask the IT department to spy on your employee’s emails to make sure they do not write inappropriate emails to stakeholders? If the answers are “yes,” I think you should seriously reconsider your leadership role if you are holding such.
One of the most demotivating things for every person, not just engineers, is a lack of trust in them. Especially in a creative area like engineering, people need the freedom to create, even if that means making mistakes. If every step would need to go through you or a senior team member’s supervision, why would you hire this person in the first place? I am talking here of trust, that an individual or group within the company organization will do their best for the company’s common goals. But in hiring professionals, you should give them the chance to make decisions, make mistakes, learn from them, and solve the problems presented to them. I will touch on the part with learning in the next articles, but let’s get back to the trust. Let’s think for a second, what will happen if you don’t demonstrate and don’t have enough trust in your team or leaders if you are a higher-level manager?
First of all, you will become a bottleneck. You can’t be involved in every single decision. If you are, why would you hire somebody? Wouldn’t it be more efficient and cheaper to do everything yourself or hire low-qualified people just to follow a simple sequence of steps instead of smart engineers? A true leader, someone said, is measured by how well their team or people are operating without them. What do you think will be the result if the team or the group always needs your approval? I’ve been there for a while. There will be low morale, low motivation, an overloaded leader, and unresolved problems. You don’t want to be there, so you should invest in your trust in others, step back, bite your tongue and watch the process from aside, at least most of the time. Imagine how fulfilling it is to know that the team will make the right decisions, handle unexpected problems, and go in the agreed direction without you supervising them. I’ve been there, too, and it is really satisfying. However, it is not ok to blindly trust that whoever joins the team or the company will go immediately in the desired direction. How can you influence this without commanding or disempowering them? Alignment.
Alignment
So, what does alignment mean? What does it bring to us? How can we achieve it?
These questions are essential for every leader or manager to gain trust and ensure that the team or department will have a certain level of autonomy to deal with everyday work and problems by themselves. Something even more important is that everything done today is done with a thought for the long-term future aligned to the vision and goal.
First of all, the beloved picture from Spotify culture. I guess that most of you at least once have watched a video of the Spotify culture or read an article. If you haven’t done it, I recommend checking it. There are some fundamental truths there.
Alignment means making sure everyone is on the same page. Everyone works for the common good and focuses on the problem, let’s say cross the river. Alignment doesn’t mean telling somebody how to “cross the river” or “how to build the next generation of tools in a certain area,” or “how to build their team and/or organization.” If you invest your energy and time in communication and alignment meetings with your team (no matter the scale) of what we (as an organization or team) want to achieve. Leave the solution to the team and your people. If necessary, try to influence but use arguments to convince and not command a particular direction. If everyone believes in or at least understands the reasons behind a specific decision or direction, it will help everyone be aligned and work for the common good. This way, you will gain the trust in the team and that everyone will do their best for the goals. But don’t forget, you should find the right level of autonomy in combination with alignment. Don’t leave things unclear. Regular meetings to catch up with the progress, decisions are taken, and ongoing actions are helpful for everyone to feel comfortable with ongoing work. This relates to the early feedback as well (another topic I will touch on in another article) and will boost everyone’s feelings of “doing the right thing” and being “empowered to make the right decisions.”
There are many ways to achieve the goal, and each of these ways has a price. You should decide what price you and your organization are ready to pay. This might be a slower time to deliver but deliver with the right quality, bad quality and quick delivery, quick organizational or product changes but the demotivated team and frustrated people. Treat your people as they deserve to be treated, as highly qualified, smart engineers and leaders, and they will treat you as their leader and will work with you, not simply for you or for the organization. This is the best way to go on a long journey, in my humble opinion.