Your code is fine. Your leadership? …

Strong leadership is the missing feature in too many technical teams. This talk will show why leadership fundamentals matter, what employees should expect (and demand) from their leaders, and how teams themselves can contribute to better outcomes. 

Expect practical insights, relatable stories, and a no-nonsense look at the human side of tech.

Talk transcript

Hello everybody, and also my apologies to people that are sitting on the floor too. I've got my emotional support cue card so I think I'm all good. I'm Rachael Fitzjohn and I'm really delighted to be talking to you all about this today.

From strong individual contributor to leader

So I have been floating around in this space for a little while. I know that that's hard to believe because I'm only 22 clearly. But what I wanted to talk about is something that's come up time and time again across various places that I've worked in, which is around the strangest career transition that I think is possible really, which is moving from someone who is, I was going to use the word strong individual contributor, but I don't think anyone's an individual contributor really. So we'll call it someone that is strongly on the tools to leading people.

So the skills that promoted you into that leadership role are often totally different to the skills that you're actually going to be drawing on almost every day as part of your role as a leader. To be promoted you were probably really technically capable. You were a person that people could go to to sort of sort things out. You were reliable under pressure and someone that can jump in and do stuff.

And then suddenly the rule book has changed on you. You need to create clarity and you're like, hmm, that's challenging. Make decisions sometimes when you don't have all of the information that you think that you need or probably do need. As Tamara was talking about, you're giving feedback now or you're expected to. You might need to manage some tensions and teams that inevitably arise over time. And you're always prioritising and you're actually not just focused on your own success anymore. If you're a good leader, you're actually focused on everyone else's success.

Now at the very least that can be a bit like, oh my God, what did I actually sign up to? That can feel a little bit inconvenient. And it's even harder if you are one of those people, like many of us, who are still on the tools using that side of your brain and you're also now having to learn these leadership skills at the same time.

So I believe very strongly that a lot of people that have gone into leadership roles or have arrived at a leadership role, they're not going to wake up in the morning and go, "How can I really f*** this up?" Well, some people think like that. No one in this room, of course. It's capable people that are doing really, really amazing work, but they may be tricked or tricking themselves into using some of those same habits as a leader.

So I don't want this talk really to be around... I mean, I'm sure that you probably will turn into wonderful charismatic leaders, but this is not the focus of this talk. I just want everyone to be a bit clearer on some of the things that they can think about and do. I want people to feel slightly braver as well and just be really, really good to your teams.

Why teams stall: nobody wants to make hard decisions

So a surprising amount of challenges with leadership is around reducing confusion. Now, I'm so sorry, I've got the most boring slides of all time. I'll have to try and be a bit more entertaining myself.

So, look, I have worked for a lot of different companies and I'm working across a few different tech clients at the moment. And to give you an example of the most recent client or team that I worked with, there was no obvious underperformance, right? They were really senior operators, they were really technically capable, they were strong, they collaborated really well, they liked each other, like, honestly, on the face of it, you're like, "What's the issue?" But they were missing deadlines all the time, they were having similar conversations, like over and over again, like driving everyone nuts trying to go round in circles with these conversations. There were bugs going out and everyone... you could tell that everyone was starting to feel really tired. So, at first glance, you know, your reaction can be, "Right, well, we've got a major delivery issue," right? No, it's honestly so much simpler than that. Nobody wanted to make hard decisions.

Because a lot of, I believe, technically strong people can sometimes feel that they want to solve things in the same way that they were doing when they were straight engineering problems. We all feel comfortable with a bit more analysis of the problem. I would like some more information to be able to make that decision. I want to be able to discuss it with these people who I like and respect. I want alignment, but leadership in those settings can often mean that you've got to make a call before everyone feels fully comfortable.

That's one of the biggest shifts, I believe, from being on the tools to being a leader. So, your job isn't just about producing amazing things anymore. It's about reducing that uncertainty for other people. So, how bloody uncomfortable is that? Pretty bad, especially when you come from a career, potentially, that rewards that sort of really precise approach to working.

So, I guess, and I'm going to scatter these through this talk a little bit, is little practical things that you can think about and try from next week. I was going to say tomorrow, but no, that's a bit mean. It's Saturday tomorrow. Instead of trying to go into a meeting saying, "What's the decision that we're trying to make here?" As opposed to, "Hey, team, what are we discussing today?" We want to give a little bit more guidance, and that one question can actually shape the energy of the room pretty well.

Good people avoiding discomfort

Next boring slide. This bit matters to me, because sometimes we talk about leaders in quite a binary way. So, I don't know if you've sort of thought about leaders, you know, your present leaders or previous leaders, and you've thought that one side of the leadership spectrum is like toxic leader. "Oh, what an absolute piece of something or other." And at the pub on Friday, we're talking about our shitty examples of weird stuff that they've been doing to us that week. You've got the toxic ones on that side, and then you've got the inspirational ones, where you're like, "Wow, that person is so amazing. I can only ever hope to be that close in my leadership journey." But of course, you know what I'm going to say next.

Most of us sit nicely in that middle spot, which is good people. We are really trying our best to do good work for our people, but we are also trying to avoid discomfort, because we're not mean, you know, as I said, we're not waking up in the morning and thinking, "How can we be difficult to people?" But avoiding that costs us quite a lot.

So, when we move into a leadership-type role, it stops being, "Can I solve this myself?" And how can I help another group of humans to solve this together, and I'm just kind of guiding around the edges, which feels, let me see, it can often feel a little bit slower as well, and it's actually got a little bit more emotion attached to it that we thought it would have initially.

So, for example, we may be avoiding difficult feedback, because we don't want to feel like we're being mean or unkind to people. We may have challenges with prioritising things. We may struggle to say no to someone who's got a really, really good idea. We might struggle to admit that something's not working. This creates some drag, unfortunately.

When intelligent discussion isn't progress

And in our workplaces, we can often, and I've been in the situations too, you mistake intelligent discussion for actually moving things forward. So, you've probably been there, right? You know, 20 minutes into this meeting, everyone's talking really intelligently. Like, everyone's got good ideas, and we're all getting there, but you're like, "What is going on?" Like, if you hit a moat, and you thought, "Where is the decision?" Like, we're not deciding anything. We're not moving it forward.

The other thing as well, especially about working in technical environments, is most of us are pretty clever, right? And so, we can absorb unclear leadership for actually quite a long time. Smart people, and I would argue that we're all smart in here, they compensate. So, you can work around gaps that you've got in the team. You can quietly carry that dysfunction for maybe longer than you should. You can over function. You can try and compensate and work even harder. Just to try and keep things going.

So, from the outside, it can actually look fine. If, you know, big boss person wanders past, "Oh, look, everyone seems to be ticking over. They're all working hard. This is great." Until that you then get that point where the delivery does actually start to slow down, the ownership feels a bit fuzzy. No-one's taking responsibility for anything. Trust drops, you know, amongst the team, and then people actually start leaving. Not at the moment because we're in an economic crisis, but, you know, that time will come, I'm sure.

More process won't fix a leadership problem

So, and then a natural response to that, which is sort of fair enough, really, if you don't know any better, is that, "Oh, we need a process to manage this. Let's chuck another process in. We need to report on that a bit more. We need a bit more data around to understand what's going on with this team. We may need another ceremony to add to all of the different ceremonies that we have already this week, or we're just going to add another step in the way that we work. But, again, this is not to do with the technical side. It's more around the leadership and the behavioural side.

So, another little thing to think about is if you are at the end of each meeting, if you are a leader or an aspiring leader, or just want a better functioning team, you can say... there's a few things that you can think about. At the end of that session, whatever it is, you can say, you want to record who decided, what was decided, right, in that session. What did you decide? Who owns it? And not the whole thing, but who owns the pieces of that puzzle that are going to push everything forward, and then when do we review it? What's our date that we're going to use?

Now, we're not going to go, "Cool, that sounds great," and then, I don't know, maybe sort of remember to update Confluence four days later? No, no, no. We want to say it in the meeting, so everyone's really clear about who's doing what and when. We just want to try and cut down some of that ambiguity around what's going on in our team. So, clicker doesn't work. That's fine.

What leadership really means

We're now moving to this isn't a tech problem, it's a leadership problem. And look, I'm sure there are loads of charismatic leaders in this room. But when I say leadership, I don't mean charisma. You can be charismatic, but that's not the defining persona of a leader. I also don't mean when you see people posting on LinkedIn around, "Oh my God, resilience," all of these things are great, and I have to do it too sometimes, but posting around resilience and then, you know, but their whole team is absolutely falling apart around them.

What I do mean is, do people understand what matters in your team? Can they make decisions? Can they challenge ideas safely? Can they speak honestly in that environment? And do they trust what behaviour gets rewarded, which is another interesting one that I'll delve into as well shortly.

But uncertainty is constant where we work. Like it doesn't matter who your employer is, what the project that you're working on is, there's always going to be uncertainty. Your priorities change. Now, if you're in a small, scaling company, your funding might change, you'll get ripped out from underneath you. Roadmaps invariably change, even though we want to lock that in. And depending on our situation, our customers can change as well, which all has impacts. So teams aren't looking for perfection from their leader or amongst each other, but they just want a little bit of clarity, enough clarity to be able to move things forward.

Why clarity beats vision

So what does good leadership look like? Sorry to tell you this, but it's not glamorous. It's just repetitive. And lots of small things, you know, those analogies of lots of, you know, what is it, it's a marathon, not a race, all of that kind of stuff. All of that stuff applies here.

You want to be consistent. You want to try and become, you want to acknowledge that you're going to feel slightly uncomfortable sometimes. And it's actually operationally really boring. We want to reduce that ambiguity because the ambiguity creates anxiety.

Now, I don't know about what you do when you're anxious. But when I'm anxious, I can do all sorts of weird things, none of which I'm going to repeat here in this room, but I'm sure that everyone's got their little things that they do. But I would argue that teams experience similar things, right? If there's anxiety and the great unknown within the team, you can start to overcomplicate situations. You can maybe overanalyse things a little bit too much in minute detail. You might overmeet and overwork yourself because you're trying desperately to understand and you might stop communicating with people as well.

So, clarity is what beats most things, including vision. And the reason I say vision is that I know that all of us have probably worked in organisations where we love a vision, right? We talk about our vision, our North Star, our reason for being, like all of that kind of stuff. But we don't fail. Teams that work in these environments, we don't fail because we didn't have a vision, right? It's because we didn't know what mattered the most in terms of work, who was making the decision, who was making the call, what success actually looked like for us a lot of the time, and what trade-offs are we willing to accept?

Clarity is underrated because it isn't very exciting, right? I have a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn, but nobody posts on LinkedIn about, "Look, I'm really thrilled to announce "that we've finally clarified our leadership boundaries." No one's going to f****** say that. But that message is so important to a team. It's so important to make a good performing team.

And clarity doesn't always need the certainty either. You can say, "I don't fully know yet," right? But this is what we do know. And so people have just got that perimeter that they can work within. That's leadership in my book.

Fewer discussions, more decisions

Think about the most frustrating situation you've been in over the last few months. Now, look, this is Wellington, so don't yell it out. Just because we all know everybody, and people are like, "Shit, two and two together. I know what that was." So just keep it in our minds.

But I am sure if you've got that thought in your mind right now, there was something along these lines that was underneath that problem, which was there was an unclear situation. There was unclear ownership. There was unclear expectations about what was expected of the team. The priorities were murky or changing, and no one knew who was making decisions on different things. Most dysfunction, I think, can come back to that.

So fewer discussions and more decisions is what we want to try and get to. In our teams, as we've probably all experienced, and believe me, I love a yarn, right? Discussions are important. They are vital to sort of hearing people out, hearing different perspectives, all of that kind of thing. And collaboration is really important as well. Endless consultation and endless going around in these circles can actually be a fancy avoidance tactic in a lot of ways.

So especially if we're new, like you've walked into a new company, you're trying to prove yourself, or it's your first time being a leader and you're like, "Shit, now's the time." We want everyone to feel aligned, and we want everyone to feel heard and included. But at some point it does need to sound a little bit more like, "This is not... It probably isn't a perfect option here, but here are the trade-offs." That's what we've got to remember, and people respect this so much more than what we think that they do.

Honest feedback and psychological safety

So skipping forward to honest feedback over comfort. Ah, feedback. Don't we love it? You know, some of us feel really nervous, and I've been in a role, and I've been giving feedback and receiving feedback for a long time. I still sometimes get the "ugh" kind of feeling. It is hard, right? We don't want to be mean.

But we can be good at... We can sort of soften it a little bit, which... is this helpful? No. Do we want to hint at it? You know, like maybe if I drop a few breadcrumbs, they might eventually work out what I'm trying to say. Or you could imply it or hope that they've somehow jumped into your mind overnight and sort of worked it out. What a lovely thought. But unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. And being unclear isn't very kind, is it? It might feel nice, but it's not kind. What we're trying to do is lean more towards the kind over the nice. And for those of you in the room who geek out over Kim Scott's Radical Candor, yes, I have pinched that from her. And I also met her a few years ago, so...

What this does destroy though, if we're not being kind and actually leaning into that feedback well, and we've got some great examples of different techniques we can try as well, is it actually destroys trust. Because people know that there's something going on, right? Or they might feel it, or there might be a change in behaviour. You've got to face into it.

And if team members start to learn that the tough conversations don't happen directly and that their leader is kind of like, "Hopefully they'll just work it out." Well, they're going to stop speaking honestly altogether. Because what you're training them is... We're not going to deal with that, thank you.

So it needs to be safe to speak and it's expected to challenge. Psychological safety, we've all heard about it. We all know that it's important, and I do believe it's important. But it doesn't need to feel or shouldn't be that you're feeling absolutely comfortable all the time. It's not possible. You can disagree, you can raise a concern. Mistakes can be talked about without any shaming or any sort of punishment.

We as leaders have to be careful not to take that personally as well. If someone has given us some feedback, instead of immediately going, "How dare you, minion?" You need to sort of stop and remember a couple of things. The first one being, "Hang on, just take a breath "to buy yourself some time to calm that down." The second one is some thinking time. Just slow down. You've got a few seconds to go, "Okay, I'm just going to process this." And then the third point about being a bit silent and allowing people to talk to you in this way is that you ultimately create a much better discussion at the end.

I'm, of course, slowed down because I could stand here for 20 minutes. I want to go through, and I'm happy to share what I'm talking about separately with anyone who wants to afterwards.

How unclear leadership shows up in teams

But just back to that clarity point. If there's not enough clarity in the team, it's sort of, you can see it in the way that the teams behave, week in and week out. They can have those repeated conversations that I talked about. The decisions can be much slower. There's sort of weird tensions and side eyes and comments and meetings, and the ownership can be really fuzzy.

We want teams to be able to avoid compensating for those unclear leadership behaviours that we can sometimes display.

Now, the avoidant behaviour from a leader also spreads like wildfire across a team as well. Because people will start to learn, "Oh, well, this is when the old 'Oh, this team is so political.' Well, where does the political stuff come from? The political stuff comes from people learn from their leader while it's actually not safe to say things like that. Or the things that get ignored. Teams are going to notice all of that stuff. What gets listened to and what doesn't get listened to, and what behaviour gets rewarded versus the behaviour that gets ignored.

The thing about, you know, and lots of companies talk about culture and we've all got posters on the wall and on the website and all of that. The company I work with has got it too. It's important, but the real culture in my mind is around repeated behaviour. The repeated behaviour that you display as a leader and that the company or the team that you work with accepts that is your culture. That is what the culture is going to be.

Practical things to try next week

So, what can you do this week? Next week, sorry, not Saturday. I'm going to talk about the things that I've said today. You're probably not like, "Wow, Rachael, that is mind-blowing." I don't think any of it's mind-blowing. You've probably heard it all before. Intellectually, you understand that it works and that it's the right thing to do. But the hard part is actually doing it consistently.

I was actually talking to someone earlier at lunchtime around you've got to put those things in place because it's when you're really busy and when things are really hard that you're like, "Oh, you've got to fall back on it." You've got to be able to fall back on it. So, we just want to improve by 10%. 10% improvement is all we want to think about each day, each week, whatever it is.

So, a few practical things. In meetings, ask, "What decision are we making today, team?" Finish with what I said, those three things and not in Confluence two weeks later. Decision, owner, deadline.

And one-on-ones, ask people, "What's feeling unclear to you right now?" Instead of that good old one-on-one question, "So, how's it going?" "Oh, good." You know, that's not overly helpful either, isn't it?

If you feel that there's tension in the team, you're feeling a little bit of a funny vibe, I think that there's something that we haven't set out large yet. If you get pushback from someone, remember, we're taking our deep breaths and we're asking them to tell us more about that. We're not immediately going, "How dare you?" We're buying ourselves some time to pause, to reflect, to allow a better conversation to occur.

And if you do need to assign work, because sometimes as leaders, you do got to say to someone, "This is what I need you to do." Be specific about the work that you're asking for. Tell them what you want the outcome to be or what the outcome has agreed to be. Talk about who the owner is of that piece of work. Is it you or this is the owner? Could you work with them? Give people a timeframe as well. Just reduce that cognitive load for people.

So, as I said, most leadership change and improvements that we can make are not going to be like transformational, "Oh my God, best leader ever," all of that kind of stuff. It's operational. 10% every day, every week. So, I'm just going to skip forward. Oh my God, I could look at all my notes. I could talk forever. We want to...

You don't need a title to lead

One thing I did want to point out as well is that you don't need to be in a leadership role to be starting to think like this or starting to behave like that. We've probably got lots of aspirational leaders in the room. And just because you're not a leader yet doesn't mean that you can't start showing some of these behaviours. You can ask clearer questions. You can reduce ambiguity. You can call things out if it feels vague or create safer discussions for people that maybe don't have the voice that you have.

And as you can tell, I can babble for ever and ever. I am happy to chat to anyone afterwards, if they want to, about some of these things. I'm absolutely honoured to be in this room. I totally respect everyone that works in tech environments. I'm proud to be adjacent. And I really appreciate you all listening to me and enjoy the rest of your afternoon and evening.