Michelle Salvado started coding in third grade. She would take time during recess to show her teachers how to use a Commodore 64, helping them create small programs to teach or test concepts such as math problems. By eighth grade, she was teaching her school’s first computer lessons in the janitor’s closet, with students rotating in and out during math class.
As a developer, Michelle always took an active role in technical discussions, focusing on customer problems. She even went back to school to study business in technology. When asked by a director if she wanted to become a manager, she took the opportunity. She was interested in learning more about leadership and helping teams thrive (instead of just showing up each day).
That desire led her to positions as an individual contributor and organizational owner over the years, stepping in and out of direct management. But Michelle has always maintained a leadership position to influence and impact positive change at organizations such as Trellix, FireEye, and McAfee.
Seeing the individuals and teams I’ve worked with over the years thrive, grow, and take a leadership stance in their own careers — with and without direct people responsibility. While I’ve had many technical accomplishments over the years, and delivered great solutions to customers problems, my greatest successes have been in the people I’ve helped grow.
It’s the ripple effect. If I can have a positive impact on 10 people and they have a positive impact on 10 more each, we now have 100 people that are better leaders, better individuals, and they too will help others as mentors, role models, and in some cases, direct managers.
Getting caught up in the day to day. As a leader, you need to keep your head above the trees so you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. You have to build it into your operating model so you don’t get lost in the sea of emails, zoom calls, and emergency requests for your time. Sometimes you need to pause and forcibly break the cycle. Ask yourself, am I spending my own time on the right things that will guide this organization into the future? What can you delegate to provide leadership opportunities to others? If you’re caught in the hamster wheel, how do you think your team is doing? They are a reflection of you.
I look at the following three factors to determine effectiveness:
It’s like asking how do you balance life and work? It’s not work-life balance, it’s just a part of life. Team health is a part of product delivery. With horrible team health, you have horrible product delivery. It has to be built into everything you do:
Transparency — avoid the natural tendency to soften the message both ways. Engineers and leaders need the honest truth. Engineers can help solve the tough problems if they are aware and they feel a responsibility for their solutions.
I use metrics that help drive specific behaviors. For example, if I see teams that need to collaborate but aren’t doing so, I’ll work with them to set metrics around their joint goals that we can measure together. I also use spot surveys to assess certain parts of the culture in the org if something seems off:
There are a few things I think are really important in addition to these metrics. First, having high emotional intelligence to understand the dynamics of individuals and groups in the organization is key and often overlooked in engineering — an understanding of yourself as a leader and an understanding of the engineers in your organization. Next is a focus on culture. Culture has to be a part of your overall strategy, not just an afterthought. Be intentional, as culture is a living thing, constantly adapting to the environment based on shared beliefs and values. It’s not what you say but what you and others in the group do.
Since 2018, I’ve had a focus on learning about culture, exploring what it is and really understanding its impact. Culture isn’t the taglines or branding you use in an organization. I’ve studied the works of Edgar Schein and others in this area because culture can be confusing and misunderstood. Yet it’s one of the most important aspects of any organization, or any group for that matter.
Schein’s classic definition of Culture is the following: “Organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered, or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that has worked well enough to be considered valid, and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
Why is it so important? As Schein points out, culture is the result of the behaviors of individuals in that group. If you aren’t intentional with your behaviors and the behaviors you support in the organization, the culture will grow unintentionally into something that is probably less than ideal but “works” for the organization as it perceives it’s doing things correctly based on how people are behaving and reacting.
Many scholars talk to the importance of culture as a part of your strategy for a business. Culture has a multiplier effect on your execution. It will either help accelerate your results or it will decelerate them. Culture can never really be duplicated, as it’s based on the people in the organization at that moment in time. So we can learn from other companies, but we can never fully duplicate it as it’s a living thing.
To build a good, strong culture:
Don’t just focus on the technical aspects of engineering — that’s why you have great engineers in your org. Think of your engineers as partners, and you are the managing partner. Your role is to help set the stage for them to perform at their best, to create an environment where they thrive as individuals and as a collective team supporting a common purpose in your organization.
Bad decision-making can thrash engineering teams unnecessarily. If a bad decision has to be reversed, it could mean rework, it could mean loss of time, loss of confidence, and loss of engagement by the engineers. Bad decisions could also put an engineering team in jeopardy of not being able to deliver what is needed for their customers and business.
Leaders make many bad decisions because of a lack of data. Some of those decisions have a high impact and are irreversible.
For example, redirecting a team without understanding how close they may be to completing in-progress work will make it harder for them when they need to finish it.
Making performance management decisions based on intuition, with no data to back it up, is a recipe for disaster.
Leaders can make smarter decisions by leveraging a quick and easy framework to understand what level of decision they’re making:
The key is that a leader needs to move quickly and only delay decisions as necessary. They should consider the risk of the decision to determine how much data is enough to provide visibility and move forward.
However, data does not mean a leader can look at a dashboard and come to a conclusion. They should ensure they have the right dialogues in the organization to get a holistic view of what’s happening. In a sense, data also includes this dialogue — the conversations with employees, stakeholders, and customers.
Engineering leaders can empower their teams to make better decisions by putting in place a few key practices:
Michelle is currently taking a career break to further build on her professional development as a leader. She continues to work in an advisory capacity while exploring organization development and leadership in Fielding Graduate University’s accelerated program.
Michelle Salvado, technology exec and advisor