Introduction

There’s a key shift that starts to happen when you become a more senior technical leader – and that’s around who your first team is. As I first became the technical representative on multi-disciplined leadership teams I knew what I was there for. To be the conduit between the leadership of the company and the technical team. Shuffling information, status and context.

Whilst that’s true, it (very) slowly dawned on me that I was not actually adding anything to the leadership team (except a few presentations here and there about technical topics or team changes). To summarise what I learned:

Being a leader is more than representing Tech in the room. It’s about being a leader who understands technology. More plainly being a leader first, a technologist second.

In this post I want to give you some practical guidance for your journey transitioning from the 1-dimensional “Tech” leader to a well-rounded leader who creates impact and influence in your organisation

The Broader Role of the Technical Leader

Being in tech, we’re often assumed to be troubleshooters, being most visible when things need done or problems need fixed. Those skills are actually crucial and do bring a ton of value – although it’s an overly simplified view. It’s not self-reinforcing for many of us. For me, it’s where I loved to operate – solving problems, getting hands-on, creating tangible value.

But as I climbed up the ladder, I increasingly found I needed a shift in the skillset. The more “lead-ery”, I became the more obvious it was that it’s not about just having the sharpest technical acumen, but it’s also about so much more. The breadth of skills and influence I needed to be successful were completely different. I found these were roughly the areas I had to materially focus on:

• Communicating with Clarity: Communicating key ideas and concepts to audiences who didn’t know or didn’t care about the technical, deeper-level details.
• Commercial Fundamentals: I had to quickly and more deeply understand how our business worked. What were the forces at play, what was the wider context the business was part of, how did the business actually make more, how do we become profitable? I was part of the team that needed to understand this much better than anyone else.
• Strategic-Level Understanding: What are we making long-term bets on? Why those bets and not others? What are Horizons 1, 2 and 3 and why are they important?

Practical Steps to Grow Beyond being the Tech in the room

There’s that classic saying of “what got your here isn’t going to get you there”. And this is a very real example of that. The skills you’ve accumulated will have been great assets to you and will continue to help you. But until you can accept that they are now a diminishing part of your skillset, you’re unlikely to make much progress as a effective leader. That may sounds hardline, but from my experience it’s very true. Trying to develop on all fronts at once stops you from progressing as you need to.

Which leads on to the first section of practical advice: The Enabling Skills. These are skills you’ll need to develop to enable you to start your next chapter of growth. Without mastering these, you’ll be trying to drive with the handbrake on…

Developing Your Enabling Skills

Delegation: Delegation is a critical skill that empowers people, promotes growth, engenders trust and enables leaders to focus on developing themselves at a much faster pace. I’ve written before about how it’s a leadership superpower. There’s also a great article here that offers practical tips on how to delegate effectively, empowering team members while getting to great outcomes. Also take a look at Lara Hogan’s blog on “Delegation is an art” which was great for me too. To boil this down, the most practical steps you can take are:

1. Create a shared context with your team about how you’d like to develop delegation as a skill and why it’s a critical skill for you all
2. Create a list of your Focus Areas and Objectives)
3. Share the list with your team (emphasising the goal to achieve more together)
4. Start identifying the opportunities to delegate, get started!
5. Iterate from there.

Seeking Feedback and Continual Learning:

As you learn new skills and transition into more leadership roles, seeking feedback and embracing continuous learning are critical. Actively seeking feedback from your team, peers, and superiors helps identify blind spots and rapidly speeds up your learning. It also has the benefit that it creates a culture of continuous learning and feedback within the team encourages ongoing development and fosters a growth mindset.

There are a ton of articles and resources that can help you here. Here area a couple of good ones I have turned to a few times that are a great start to your feedback journey:

• Engineering Managers Guide to Open, Honest and Constructive Feedback
• Re:Work Article on Engineering Manager Competencies
• The 5-5-5 Feedback Technique

Developing New Skills

Going back to my key areas, here are some practical advice on how to expand your skills beyond the technical dimension:

Communicating with Clarity

As leaders, it becomes more and more important that we’re effective communicators. What we say and do is amplified by our teams. So clear, concise, and empathetic communication can make a huge difference in developing excellent context and developing the culture we want. There’s a couple of great articles on this from Will Larson on Communicating to Executives and Internal Comms for Executives that are definitely worth a read. They cover both angles really well – communicating up and communicating out.

Above the great advice from Will Larson, there are some specifics though that I learned through feedback and trial and error. Especially when communicating with my First Team (my leadership team).

1. The One Message: What’s the one point you want your audience to remember (one single point!). Focus exclusively on that. Don’t add more detail than you need – focus, focus, focus!
2. Test for Understanding: After communicating, check for understanding. If you’re comfortable, ask in the moment in front of everyone. Alternatively, ask some trusted colleagues afterwards: what was the message, what would have helped hit it harder.
3. Find a Partner: I’ve used a “trick” in many sessions where I’ve found a trusted partner and have given them some really tough questions to ask. Once the communication is done, they’ll pipe up with hard questions for you to answer. It’s a great trick because you’ll start to get the questions from people that they would normally be too polite to ask. This works especially great in a smaller leadership session where you want candid feedback and open debate. It doesn’t work too well in big settings.

Commercial Fundamentals

Bottom line here – if you don’t understand the business you’re in, you’ll forever be behind the room. If you can’t understand the story of the financials of the business, you’ll be reliant on someone’s interpretation. You can’t turn up as a informed and proactive leader. The great news I’ve learned is that CFO and Heads of Finance love to talk about the business fundamentals. My main (and only) piece of advice here is to just ask them for help!

I took the plunge when I was VP of Engineering and asked our Financial Director to walk me through the Balance Sheet and Monthly Report and from that we became a great partnership that helped each other understand each other’s world and how we could work together.

I would also suggest you take a look at a couple of solid articles/videos for some background knowledge too:

• Eng Leaders Introduction to Understanding The Business
• Financial skills every leader should know

Strategic-Level Understanding

As a technical leader, working on various time horizons is crucial. In the past, you may have focused mostly on short-term goals, receiving quick feedback to check that you’re on the right path.

However, as you transition into a more strategic leadership role, feedback loops become longer and harder to navigate.

Developing a strategic-level understanding of your business, your roadmap and your technology grows in importance. You’ll struggle to be effective as a leader at all if you don’t develop those strategy muscles move.

I wanted to share with you a good starting point to understand and develop and test your strategic thinking:

• Observe: Note your current understanding
• Test: Share and test your view with others and refine your understanding
• Adapt: Develop your own view and communicate that with your peers and team

Observe: Note your current understanding

A good way to judge if you’re understanding the strategy is to consider the idea of horizons for your business and ask yourself some important questions. To begin with, I would suggest you could do the following. For the 3 time horizons:

• Horizon 1 (the next 6 months)
• Horizon 2 (6 – 12 months)
• Horizon 3 (1 year +)

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What are the one or two key goals for the business in that period?
2. Why are these the goals and where did you come from?
3. What happens if you don’t succeed? How will the business change?

Test: Share and test your view with others and refine your understanding

This is where you have to be open to learning and willing to sound like a beginner again. Once I’d noted down my perception of the current strategy of those three horizons, I then sought out people who could fill in the gaps and check my homework. Based on that experience, here’s a quick list of what I’d suggest you could do next:

1. Identify 3 people that you value for their strategy view in the company
2. Ask them for help to learn more about the strategy
3. Share with them the documented observations you have and invite them to add more context and fix what’s wrong (this was crucial for me. I learned quickly that asking people “can you tell me strategy?” without some notes first led to hours of listening and very little understanding. When it comes to strategy, everyone talks in a language that makes sense to them and it can be super hard to join the dots)
4. Iterate over the notes until you could explain it to someone else in your team (in fact sharing it with your team is a great idea)

Adapt: Develop your own view and communicate that with your peers and team

The last step is definitely the hardest but for me, led to the most growth. For me, it meant understanding the strategy enough so I could draw conclusions from it. So that I could explain what it meant for technology and why. I intend to write an article soon on writing a Technical Strategy, but for this exercise (and the first part of a Technical Strategy) is purely just drawing a clear line from the business strategy to the technical strategy. Here’s what I would suggest you focus on:

1. Summarise the business strategy into a single paragraph. The shorter the better.
2. Write a “so what” section next. What does this strategy mean for technology. Again, the shorter the better.
3. Share widely!
   1. If you have a coach or mentor – share these two pieces with them. If you don’t find some senior technical people you trust and share with them. Get some early feedback
   2. Share with your peers and get more feedback.
   3. Share with your team and get more detailed feedback.

At the end of this process you’re likely to get a ton of “and what does that mean for X” questions. You’re not firmly in the strategic mindset and you’ve built yourself a nice platform to move on from. You’ve also validated your understanding of the business strategy and in a great place to understand when it changes.

Last thoughts Embracing the Leadership Role

The transition to leadership isn’t always easy. Personally I spend a lot of time and energy going back to the same set of skills I trusted (problem solving, getting to the technical details, etc) when I could have been creating more impact in the company by communicating better, developing a better sense of the company and developing a strategic understanding. Hopefully with these practical tips you can shortcut that learning and bring more than being Tech at the leadership table.

For me, the shift was more painful than it needed to be, but the value to me and the company has been brilliant. I’ve never loved my role more than I do now – probably because it was hard earned, but also that I can see how I’m being more valuable to my leadership team. The feedback I get from my peers on leaning in to the business challenges and not sitting back on my tech skills has unlocked so much more that I can help with. It’s a virtuous cycle for sure.

I hope this guide helps you in embracing your leadership role.