Lead Time Crunch #3

Hi, this is a mini newsletter for engineers thinking about management.

I’m Péter Szász, writing about my decades of engineering leadership experience on my blog, and mentoring aspiring and first-time Engineering Managers on this path. See more about what I can offer to you at leadtime.tech.

In this newsletter, I pose a weekly EM challenge and leave it as a puzzle for you to think about before the next issue, where I share my approach, one possible solution amongst many.

Last Week’s Challenge

Last week, I shared a growing conflict where Bob, a junior developer received very concise feedback on his PR from Cecile, a senior engineer on the team. Check the context first if you missed it.

Here, my goal is to help Cecile grow her soft skills around communication and empathy while maintaining my trust in her technical leadership. This is a hard balance because she’s right in the essence of her feedback, but her delivery was horrible. I don’t want my message to make her take the back seat and lose her care, but she should be better at communicating her feedback to have the desired results.

My preferred approach in these situations is to apply to the person’s care about the product and show them how they can be more efficient.

First, I would ping Cecile if she has time for a quick feedback meeting about her comment on the PR. I want to give her a chance to collect her thoughts, re-read what she wrote, etc. I don’t want to surprise her with this on a scheduled 1:1, because there’s a risk that she would switch to be defensive. Also, it’s too late, we just had one, and I want to communicate now while the events are fresh and not wait for the next 1:1.

During the meeting, I would ask her what was her intention with this message. When she explains the technical requirements, she may refer to my mandate to pay attention to code health in the team. I would ask the key question: “Do you think this message is efficient in reaching that goal?” If she doesn’t get it, I would try to continue leading her on: “Imagine you only have a year of experience and get feedback like this from a respected senior developer. Do you feel you have the support of that developer to fix this PR? Do you know what to do? Are you motivated to do it?”.

It’s important not to assume and jump to conclusions, she might have had other intentions or could’ve been distracted, and the tone might have been an accident. So I would remain curious to discover the full context. Still, I think it’s an important opportunity to drive home the point of efficiency.

My goal in this phase of the discussion is to reach an agreement on the problem, that this was not an efficient message. Spending time to make sure we agree that something is a problem to fix before moving on to the fix itself is helpful in multiple ways: first, the person I’m working with will be a motivated partner in finding solutions; second, I maintain the accountability on their side: this is not “my problem you need to fix” because “I told you so” — no, it’s a mistake you’ve done that I help fix.

Once we are on the same page about the problem, we can move on to the solution. I would generally lead the person on with questions like “How do you plan to handle this?”. Make sure that your questions are not heard as a game of Guess What The Boss Wants To Hear From Me. I can set expectations, describe what good looks like, but they own the problem and they should have autonomy in choosing how to solve it. Depending on their maturity, I would be more or less opinionated about their ideas, but in general, I’d let them experiment: it’s much better to learn something by trying than just following your manager’s advice.

Quick tip, avoid framing your feedback between two compliments, something like

“It’s great that you’re taking the iniciative to lead proactively, it’s exactly what I expected from you after our talk. I think you should’ve used a softer tone to help Bob understand the issue with his PR, because on surface, your comment sounded terse. I trust in your leadership to handle this with him and continue to keep up a high technical standard.”

This technique is often used by conflict-averse leaders, who want to balance giving constructive feedback with praise to lessen the pain of the conversation. In reality, there are two big risks with this approach:

• Lack of clarity: your report might wonder “Did I do good or not?”

• Lack of severity: there’s a high risk that only your praise will be taken seriously, and there’s less attention on the area you wanted to raise.

Don’t be tempted to choose this easy approach, it’s no wonder this is sometimes called a “shit sandwich”.

Did you ever face similar challenges in your career? How did you approach those situations? Is there something I missed? Would you have handled it differently? Let me know in the comments!

This Week’s Challenge

Let’s try something different to think about for next week!

You’re David, an EM responsible for a small cross-functional team. Ethan, a longtimer at the company, and by now the most experienced developer on the team, is returning from his timely 2-week vacation. The last few months were exhausting for the team, and him especially. Multiple incidents made focusing on work difficult, while an important product launch required concentrated work from everyone. You just managed to ship what was planned before the vacation, so you’re hoping that Ethan’s time off allowed him to recharge well. You have big plans with him, he’s growing in his role nicely, and a long-expected promotion might be getting closer for him.

You have a 1:1 scheduled for his first day, and the minute you start the call you sense something’s not right. After discussing his vacation, he jumps right into what sounds like a well-practiced speech:

”Listen, David, I’ve been thinking a lot while I was away, and I decided to quit.”

You try to hide your initial shock as you listen to him explaining his reasons, mentioning a perceived negligence of his career aspirations, frequently changing company directions, and ever-growing tech debt in our product. While these complaints are not entirely new to you, their intensity is definitely a surprise.

When he stops, it’s time for you to react.

What do you say?

Think about the various aspects of this situation, and how you would answer hearing these from Ethan. I’ll share how I would approach this discussion in the next issue. If you don’t want to miss it, sign up here to receive it, and similar weekly challenges in the future:

Until then, a small piece of inspiration:

See you next week,

Péter