042 | Few Thoughts on Leadership Traits
Be a noob; admit I'm wrong; uplift others
Lately I’ve been thinking about leadership traits. I’d like to reflect a few things. I’m sure I’ll return in a year and comment something different; but here is what I have on mind for the past 1-2 years.
I stepped into a new role. Since a over a year ago, I took on the so-called uber TL role, working with all teams of my 40 eng org. Before this, I have been a team local TL (~15 eng) for a few years, where I felt very comfortable both on the business context and technical depth. With this uber TL role, I changed to report to my skip and started leading a new space. Challenging? Yes tiny little bit, but nothing out of ordinary; it’s the usual of learning the team’s priority and learning to think from this team’s perspective.
I made a break-through in trust building with new folks. Personality wise, (I’d like to believe) I’m the opposite of intimidating so I definitely can’t force people to follow. I treated people with respect and they waved back respect; no issues but also no sparkles. A few months ago, I had an accidental break-through; we had an external conflict with a team where i protected my engineers’ scope, did some level of navigation and put off the fire. Surprisingly, and without my commanding, I’ve gained a lot more trust.
Through this event but also over the past 1+ years of learning, I came up with a few things -
1/ Ask noob questions, be willing to be the dummest person in the room. It does not matter if the person in front of me is junior or senior. If I let go my ego, my peer will lower the guard and actually share their opinions.
2/ Be willing to say ‘I was wrong’, ‘I am sorry’ to the team. Coming from a leader, this gives everyone permission to try new things and removes the necessity of perfect impression. Growing a team of high agency engineers is invaluable. High agency here means: they not only have their own ideas but also have the support to actually take actions.
3/ Craft opportunities for my ENG to shine when things go well; step up to take blame when things go south. A lot of great leaders do this unintentionally - they just love uplifting people, giving people credits, and enjoy seeing others grow. I think personally I have a bit of manager traits where I really enjoyed seeing people around me landing massive impact and grow; indirectly, that proves my time investment into them and I some way ‘I had eye for talent’.
These things are not some novel ideas I came up with. We can observe these traits through leadership stories in history; I can observe great leaders at Meta behaving like this. I’m just experiencing these things first hand. Now I really interested to see where this journey takes me, what new leadership traits / rules I unpack, or what other traits to avoid.