I'm discussing with a lot of people lately about what it means to be a leader when it comes to the workplace. This is most often talked about in the context of management, but I strongly believe this applies to everyone, regardless of their function or level. I'm not going to blow your mind with the advice here, but I do want to give you some perspective from my current role as an EM and hopefully you can apply some of these ideas in your own role.
So why am I writing this in the first place? It's because I believe that leadership is perhaps the most important trait that predicts success. And I'm not just talking about being successful at a regular 9-to-5 job - this applies to everything from entrepreneurship to your personal life.
So what does it mean to be a leader in my perspective? A lot of things, but here I want to talk about four aspects:
Care (about everything)
It might sound overly simplistic or vague, but trust me, if you remember something from this article, let it be this - if you don't care about what you're doing you won't get far.
Is one of your peers asking you a question or requesting your help with something? Don't leave them hanging for several hours, try to help or at least respond.
Working on a ticket that requires code changes? Try to leave the code base just a little better than when you started. Even if this only adds 0.001% to the overall quality, you have no idea how big of an impact this has over the long run.
Have you finished your work early? Ask your peers if they need any help with anything - code, testing, documentation, review etc. Remember, it's always a team game.
Just deployed your new shiny feature to production? Congrats, now make sure the monitoring/alerting stack is in shape - your team will need to support it once it's live.
You get the idea - care about your product, code, tests, documentation, infrastructure, customer tickets etc. But most of all, care about people. The most successful people I've seen deeply care about the people around them and form powerful bonds that enable their long-term success.
Fortunately (or unfortunately for some) caring can't be faked. You either care about something or you don't - and this shows. But don't get me wrong - you don't need to care about literally everything. Some things won't be your cup of tea and that's fine. Just make sure the list of things you care about is longer, otherwise it's probably time to change teams/projects/jobs.
Communicate better
Probably the granddaddy of all clichés when it comes to professional advice, and for a good reason - it's a skill that we always need to improve. It doesn't matter if you're not a natural when it comes to communication, it's something that everyone can learn. I've written many times about this, so here are a few more ideas to consider:
- Listen more than you talk. This is especially useful in 1:1 settings or large groups. Don't be passive, but make sure you understand the opinion of others before you speak - this will save everyone a lot of time in the long run.
- Learn from others. Try to join calls with folks that are good at communication - this might be your Director, HRBP or your fellow engineer - and "steal" some of their lines or general approach. I've done this countless times.
- Get to know the other person. If you're in the office this is easy, as you can just drop by someone's office and chat for a bit. If you're remote, consider just writing to say hi to folks or ask them about their day. If someone shares something personal about themselves, consider sharing something of your own. If you know someone just had an important moment in their life, drop them a message to let them know that you care. You get the idea - work or not, personal ties are key to succeeding at anything in life.
- Have a light-hearted tone. Work is pretty serious as is, it's sometimes worth making a small joke or friendly comment to help remember that there's more to life than just work.
- Follow-up often. Keep others posted about your work, especially if it impacts them in some way.
- Say please and thank you. Get in the habit of saying these words often and you can thank me later.
You'll notice that I don't mention anything technical here. That's not because it's not important - it is. But you know what it's even more important? Being effective at interpersonal communication and being someone that others love working with.
Take initiative
The basic idea is don't wait for someone to constantly tell you what to do. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to know or do everything by yourself, it just means that you should take the lead and move things forward.
Built something cool that others might be interested in using or knowing? Go ahead and schedule a presentation with the larger group. You don't need your manager to give you time or permission for that.
See a process that needs to be defined or improved? Take some time and come up with a proposal. It doesn't need to be final, it just needs to get the discussion started. Don't get enough feedback on your proposal? Follow-up, multiple times if needed.
Does your team or organization need a volunteer for something? Let them know that you're interested. You'll gain valuable experience and visibility.
These are just a few trivial examples, but the idea is the same - be proactive. It's one of the defining traits of a leader, to take initiative and push forward for themselves and their team. Of course, choose your battles here. You don't want to be proactive in everything as this will be counter-productive, instead look to align these things with your professional goals. I've written an article about goals here.
Look ahead
There's one more thing that leaders do - they look to the future and think of ways for creating the best outcome for themselves and others around them. This requires a level of strategical thinking that is IMO a hallmark of a top performer.
Don't put all your efforts into just implementing your current tasks. Leave some time for finding out what's coming next - it might impact some of the decisions that you need to make now. Oftentimes what's coming next is not so clear - there might be some vague product ideas or maybe too many ideas and not enough time to do them all. That's normal and this is where taking initiative comes into play. As a part of a team, it's your responsibility to help shape this future, whatever it is. It might involve doing a deep dive to figure out if something makes sense, or it might involve estimating the risk and impact of things. I don't care if you're a new grad or senior principal, everyone has a part to play in their team's roadmap. So go ahead and book some time with your mentor, manager, PM or whatever you need to get a broader context of things. You should never be in a place where you don't know what to do next.
Dealing with the unknown can be scary but it's usually exciting and extremely rewarding when things go right. The more experience you have, the farther ahead you can look. That's what leaders do - they lead others into uncharted territory. And there's a lot of territory to cover in the tech world.
Conclusion
Doesn't matter if you're an IC, manager or someone non-technical - there's room for leadership in all roles and all teams. High-performing individuals and teams exhibit this common characteristic and it's easy to see why, if you think about it. Oh, also go and read Turn the Ship Around, it's one of my favorite books and speaks about this topic at length.