When I was a first time VP I grew an engineering team to triple its size. It was a big job and required a lot of energy and focus. What I learned two years later, however, was that I had not built solid relationships upwards and outwards. It was a rookie move at its best. I was too focused on my own department, engineering. And there was no chance at a do over, at least at my particular company. Learn from my mistakes.
You might be a director, VP or part of the C-Suite. You could be in engineering, product or design. The tech leadership dynamic discussed in this book applies at all of these levels and disciplines that come together to lead the development of software.
To succeed in tech leadership, you need to focus your time and attention in a variety of directions. That is, you need to master what I am calling “leadership dynamics.” This is the ability to proactively and reactively operate in and switch between four key relationship contexts: the manage up context, the peer context, the team context, and the self context.
I didn’t realize all of this when I was in my first VP role (nor in the director roles I had held prior). My natural default was to have an intense focus on my functional team, at the expense of the other relationship contexts. I think other first time senior leaders probably do this as well, because that’s what we know. We focus on developing the people that report to us, our organizational structure and needs, as well as the products or services we are building. We want to be respected and effective leaders, so we focus on our team. We're finally the decision makers, so now we get to build out our teams the way we think they should be. But that’s not enough. We need to focus on the other contexts and people beyond our team as well while bringing our best self along for the ride.
