#9 - Intentional Technical Leadership

Olá my friend!

Happy Saturday! 🎉

👋🏻 Welcome to another issue of the Intentional Technical Leadership newsletter.

How has your week been? Did you learn something new?

I've been getting up to speed with how Netlify works and expanding my network by reaching out to as many people as I can.

Whenever I start a new role, I spend some time getting to know my team, my peers, and the wider software engineering community to understand the scope of the work and any challenges that people may have. Using this knowledge you can start explore growth opportunities for yourself and your team and make connections across the business.

If you don't do this already, then make it your mission to connect with a few new people this week.

On to this week's interesting reads. 👇🏻

🔖 Interesting Reading

From Engineer to Tech Lead - Doubts and Challenges

This is an interesting read for anyone who is starting to make that transition from being a software engineer into a management role. Companies that have a "Tech Lead" role are often the stepping stone to move into management.

In this blog post, the author makes some good points about the need to lead by example and help your team to do their best work. A move to this role means you have wider impact across your team and the business as a whole.

What makes an inclusive leader?

To succeed as a technical leader, you need the full contribution of your team. But how do we tap into that potential from everyone?

Being more inclusive.

When transitioning into a leadership role, I've tried hard to ensure all of my team bring their full selves to work. I try to help everyone to be heard.

This article shares some great ideas for ensuring that you're an inclusive leader by recognising each team member's work and supporting their career growth.

Taking out the guesswork: How to set clear expectations as a manager

As a technical leader it's important to ensure clarity in the work you and your team are doing. Setting clear expectations for the team is key to this.

This blog post contains some good strategies for ensure that expectations are clear for yourself and your team to avoid confusion.

Managers should ask for feedback

Leading on from the previous link about expectations, this is another insightful read about soliciting feedback.

As a manager or leader, it's often easier to give your team feedback. It's part of your role and something you're probably more used to doing. However, you need to ensure you build psychological safety with your team or peers so that can give you feedback too.

This article shares some great ideas to ensure that you are enabling trust within your work relationships so that you can give and receive feedback more openly.

👋🏻 One From Me

How do you measure success?

When I moved into a technical leadership role, I often struggled to define how good or bad my day or week was. As a software engineer it was easy to define what software I'd written and shipped to the production environment. But how do you measure success as a leader?

I wanted to document some thoughts I had on what success means for myself and for others. Take a read and tell me what you think.

🌶️ Hot Take

Employee Burnout - Brian Noyle on LinkedIn

I thought this was an insightful take on why employees could be leaving your organisation and what they might not be telling you in their 1:1s.

You need to be checking in regularly with your team to understand if they are ok and whether they're feeling overwhelmed. It's easy for technical leaders to fill their team's calendar with update meetings that make your life easier but think about the effect this can have on your team.

I hope you enjoyed this week's selection of intentional technical leadership articles.

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

Feel free to send me any interesting articles or podcasts you've found too.

Have an amazing week and be excellent to each other!

Speak to you soon,
Marc

Senior Engineering Manager @ Netlify