Getting out of the way

How to empower team members and delegate effectively.

An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader

This post is a summary of the approach and tools I’ve used to build an engineering team, where everyone is a leader by rotating project lead responsibilities within the team. It includes sharing of the project management expectations Google Docs guide that my team uses. It’s also a reflection on the pain points that came with this approach. I can’t advocate for how universally this approach could work. However, based on my results, it is something I suggest engineering leaders - especially frontline managers - consider as an option.

Maximising involvement in mixed seniority engineering teams

Let’s consider the product strategy. How might leadership guide but devolve it to the whole team?

I think about this as sort of an accessibility problem. Most senior individuals have developed mental models to sense-adapt, navigate, and use their experience to notice gaps or flaws within (mostly) verbally communicated strategies. These strategies then get translated into backlog items, often disconnected from the true value chain and decision making.

Supporting your team in the face of technical unknowns

Interesting, meaningful work that pushes boundaries and enriches lives almost always involves a degree of uncertainty. The strategies outlined in this article will help you and your team confidently embrace the challenges that come with it.

Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish

New hires don’t walk into your company already knowing your culture. They walk in anxious — hoping for success and fearing failure. They look around them to figure out how they are supposed to behave. They see who’s succeeding, and they imitate what they’re doing as best they can. They figure out who’s failing, and they try to avoid being like them.

Eiffel’s Tower

We all say we want to do groundbreaking work, just like Eiffel, but what does it actually take to push an organization forward? The answer starts long before the work itself. Let’s see what we can learn from how Gustave Eiffel went about building his record-shattering tower.

Innovation Isn’t All Fun and Games — Creativity Needs Discipline

The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors. A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability. And flatness requires strong leadership. Innovative cultures are paradoxical. Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.

Delegation Poker cards

Is your team ready for self-organization? Delegation Poker is a way for you and your team to implement the Seven Levels of Delegation. Together, you not only decide who does what, but to what extent does the decision-making power lie with each teammate, dependent upon the task or project. This surprisingly fun game is a great way to increase employee empowerment. Make sure someone takes notes or puts it up on a semi-permanent board in the office, so you are all on the same page!

Feature Leading in Agile Teams

The Feature Lead becomes the ‘go-to’ person for issues pertaining to their respective feature. In this, we must be careful that they don’t become unicorns that we can’t function without. A large part of the Feature Lead role is to find the balance in sharing the right amount of knowledge with the team. We can’t pull the team into all feature-related meetings and discussions, while some people might be focusing on different features or streams of work.

Delegate outcomes, not activities

Keep that in mind. Not only is delegation a means to getting something done in the here and now — it’s a means for helping your team get something even harder done the next time around. You’re giving your team the opportunity to take in what works and what doesn’t, observe, stumble, fall… and then figure it out themselves. How else will they figure it out if you don’t even give them the chance to try?