How do we make sure that we are deliberate about the culture of our organization and not find ourselves pushing for outcomes without care of how we achieve them?
Jason and Eiso go through the building blocks of positive company culture and explore how companies and leaders can adapt as their teams grow from two people in a garage to thousands of employees. From setting priorities to communicating effectively to operating in first-team mode, there are countless ways engineering leaders can make a difference in their companies and teams. We explore them in this episode of Developing Leadership.
https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=te7gw-109c6a7-pb&from=pb6admin&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=f6f6f6&font-color=auto&btn-skin=ff6d00
Heard a term or concept you want to learn more about? Jump to topic explainers.
No one talks about your decision-making processes. No one talks about what happens when the site is down. No one talks about, you know, what's going to happen when a customer churns, how the entire company is gonna react. I mean, that's culture right there, those sorts of things.
There's a quote from Maya Angelou, which I talk about generally speaking for leadership, which is: "People will forget what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel", and when you think about culture and you think about engineering or anything else, this is what you're actually referring to.
There's a joke that I like to say which is that the CEO should be the one who's prioritizing for the company. But ironically, it's the CTO who will probably push most of the prioritization, because that's where it has to happen. The dirty little secret of the industry is that the CTO will, say, prioritize 10 times more than anyone else in the company, and it's because that's where the actual rubber meets the road.
There's an amount of speed that you can get, but speed always comes with its trade-offs. At Athenian, we always say: "You can move really fast, ship lots of features, but your quality is going to suffer. You can have amazing quality, but you're going to have to ship slower, and you're going to have to invest in areas that are not necessarily as customer-facing." And I always like to joke a little bit, it's like CAP theorem and databases, you can only ever have two out of the three. I can have speed and quality, but that means I'm mainly shipping bug fixes. Right? I can have speed and features, but that means my quality is going to suffer.
I think running a company in a division, you would actually have to be a better communicator. You have to understand the psychology of the organization. You have to know how to inspire. You have to have more than one method too. You've got to be X to this group, or Y to this group or Z to this group.