The team lead path

Being a team lead at Automattic is not a promotion, but it is very challenging and after doing it for the last year, I understand why.

During 2020, just before an intense hiring spree, I got the opportunity to lead a small team of 3 software engineers. Our primary responsibility was WooCommerce Payments (alongside 3 other teams). With payments being a business focus, we needed more engineers. And in what felt like no time, a 6 month onboarding rollercoaster season led to the team growing to 8 people!

My vague team management ideas did not serve me well. I hoped to figure things out as I went along and expected work to remain as is, with a few leadership tasks added. No big changes. I was very wrong. Two major areas changed: my schedule and work type.

As an individual contributor I had two standard meetings per week. One with the team and one with my manager. As a manager, I now have eight check-in’s (1on1 with each member of the team), the team meeting and the meeting with my director. Along with these there are also other meetings that I have to fit in the gaps.

The type of work also changed. I was no longer writing code, but rather, spending a lot of time in google docs, messaging and P2 (our replacement for email). I could still help out with code reviews and do minor code changes, but I really struggled to find uninterrupted time to think deeply about the technical problems. Along with this I had to get used to the constant context switching.

Automattic truly supports team leads. We all get access to one on one coaching with a professional external coach. The company runs remote training cohorts specifically for team leads and on top of this you have access to any learning resource that could help you become a better leader and manager.

Besides work there were also so many changes in my life. The Covid-19 pandemic, loss of loved ones and 2 new arrivals in our family, Ariah and Avah. On top of it all I also undertook completing my academic qualification. I’m not complaining here, but just wanted to highlight how there really wasn’t any time for extra hours of reading and learning about the new path.

While figuring everything ways to handle the new path, I began to discover how valuable an impactful team lead can be. I began to see small things that came about as a result of my championing. I realised how my impact on other team leads can move the organisation forward.

As a new team lead you try and throw things together, a mix of what you’ve seen others do and you try to avoid the bad things that you’ve experienced. This mix doesn’t really help as you constantly doubt yourself. I think this past year helped me to discover the type of lead I’d like to be and what I can work towards.

My grandfather used to say: “Time changes many things”. I feel like this new path challenges me to change into a better version of myself. The great thing about the team lead path at Automattic is that because it’s not a promotion, you can always switch back. Maybe the pendulum will swing back and I will become a better individual contributor or perhaps I’ll stick it out and be the best manager I can be.

Remote spelled out is TRUST

2 planes in tandem with people performing stunt on top of them.

Bright and I had a very interesting chat about remote work, because of the COVID-19 lockdown situation in South Africa, they were thrown deep into the weirdness of distributed work.

Our conversation started with a simple question: “How do you know if someone is actually working when you can’t see them ?”. Most in-office manager’s who are used to making the connection between seeing and believing, must be thinking this at some point.

I thought about it for a moment and realised that we do not think about new hires like this at Automattic.

New hires are given full trust. They get access to all the systems, all decisions for the past 15 years, all the user data their role requires and the full faith in their ability to do what’s required to move the business forward.

My very first remote manager, Michael Krapf, had a saying that went something like this: “A good trend means a good worker, and a bad trend means a bad worker”. You could interpret it as; we should not evaluate people on an instance by instance basis, but should rather keep in mind what they do over a period of time and evaluate that.

In a work setting, low trust relationships are normally created when people don’t do what they say they were going to do. This doesn’t mean that we expect someone to be perfect, it’s just means that there is an expectation of progress, and obstacles being communicate in a timely and transparent manner.

When you have a low trust relationship, you will have to shorten the feedback periods considerably. This evaluation period should be well understood by all involved. The aim here should be to grow trust, not to have continuous checkups that puts only one side of the relationship at ease.

When trust grows, so should the evaluation period. In fact, you should expect trust to grow so much that there is no evaluation period. This is the peak of trust, all involved respects each other so much that, no news is good news and transparent communication is the natural outflow of progress.

Trust is also the basis of collaboration and collaboration the basis of a forward moving team. So start with high trust and work forward from there.

Featured Image by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

What does 6 months paternity leave feel like with 2 babys?

I didn’t want to say much about this as it is not that common, especially here in South Africa. The norm here is three days and some annual leave. When I share that I’m on family responsibility leave and for how long, people usually either respond with excellent or a mild form of disgusted jealousy. I’m am truly blessed to have the privilege of paid leave for such a long time.

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