If I let you 5 minutes to answer this question, what dimensions or areas of your life would you measure?

(Don’t keep reading until you have answered yourself)

People often think about wellness in terms of physical health — nutrition, sleep, exercise, etc. but it is so much more. When we at LIDR think about wellness, we take a holistic approach.

For us (and many others), wellness integrates physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Using a 7-dimensions model, we make sure we are balanced, and our daily activities, even the smallest ones, fuel our body, engage our mind and nurture our spirit.

In fact, we take it very seriously at LIDR

People First is one of our core values. 

We deeply believe in the power of wellness to give our fullest potential, and to get it from our peers and collaborators. Motivated employees who are both able and willing to give their best every day are the key factor for organizations to achieve ambitious long-term goals.

However, there is one concept that has gained more and more awareness lately, especially since the pandemic hit the world.

Yes, I’m talking about mental well-being.

For knowledge workers, lines between work and home have become increasingly blurred. 

It’s not only that many of us are working longer hours. We also have experienced how difficult it is to look after children, and how our social interactions have changed.

In 2019, ‘burnout’ was recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as an ‘occupational phenomenon’, but the problem of burnout has been around for decades.

Then, the pandemic pushed our world into a mental health crisis, and burnout is now cited more than ever as a reason for people to quit.

Often, mental health challenges go unnoticed in the tech culture and burnout rates are increasing day after day.

As a manager, it is your responsibility to address your team’s mental health before these problems affect their lives in depth and, in consequence, affect the entire company.

Deliberately focus on the well-being of your team, demonstrate actively that you care for them, and foster practices that increase overall well-being. 

Lead by example, start the conversation if it’s not happening yet, and facilitate the adoption of individual and team measures.

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That’s why Wellness is one of the most important areas of our Self-Leadership course, which is mandatory for everyone joining LIDR Academy, regardless of the role, seniority or goals.

Actually, on the upcoming November 16th, Francisco Vieira Mendes, co-founder at Yerbo, will come to share some tools to help you level up your own well-being management, based on well-being and burnout data from the tech industry. 🔥

During the session, you'll learn about new concepts such as mental zones, main stressors in tech, and ways to track your burnout risk and increase your chances of going into the flow state in the search for high performance with well-being.

If you are interested in joining us, join LIDR Academy, get access to this and more workshops, besides +200 hours of content to grow as a great leader in tech.

📚 Free Resources To Grow As A Great Engineering Lead

⚒️ Burn Out Index 2.0

Join over 200,000 individuals and check your burnout risk and work engagement levels for free! — A tool powered by Yerbo.

🔗 Check it out here

📄 Supporting Mental Health in Tech Culture

Too often, mental health challenges go unnoticed in tech culture. But it’s critical to address employees’ mental health before these problems affect your organization.

This article from BairesDev shares the main reason why should we work to address mental health in tech culture and some solutions to put it into practice.

🔗 Read the article here 

What makes them leave a secure job, gamble everything to solve a problem they have identified in the society and never give up? 

Better yet, how can they stay focused, perform at the highest level, radiating optimism and attract the best talent, despite endless work days, debts or commitments, fierce competition and an uncertain environment?

The entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills and attitudes that make all the difference. —  From passion to resilience to communication and problem-solving, entrepreneurs exhibit qualities that are highly desirable in any position in any organization.

You will agree that successful leadership in tech requires much more than this entrepreneurial mindset — but having the mindset, attitude, business knowledge, and vision will make a HUGE difference from the first contact. 

In this LIDR Pill #30, I'll describe what the entrepreneurial mindset is for me, what it stands for, how to develop it, plus some extra tips you can use to stand out as an engineering lead (or any other IC role). 

The entrepreneurial mindset

For me, it means behaving like a founder/CEO — whether you are a junior developer or the CTO. It is an attitude towards work, regardless of where you are in the organization.

It means feeling the company's ownership and doing everything in the business' best interest. It means thinking about the customer and the problem the company is trying to solve.

It's an attitude that only brings great things.

As a serial entrepreneur, and now trying to help others to grow as leaders, I tried to dissect the different aspects of the mindset by asking: what do you need to launch a company successfully?

For that, I’ve identified 4 pillars, 4 skills that differentiate successful entrepreneurs:

Ownership  

Entrepreneurs are responsible and accountable for everything that happens, and they do whatever it takes to succeed. They risk their income, risk their own money for a dream.

You own each project, feel it as yours, involving other skills as: 

• Passion: you deeply want to solve that problem in the world, and love the work it involves to make it happen, even if you don’t like some of the tasks.
  

• Problem-solver: You are a natural problem-solver. Entrepreneurship is just about that: solving a relevant problem for customers. Think about anyone requesting anything as a final customer, treat them like that, and check the difference.
  

• Resilience: You keep pushing, even when things look hard. You know is part of the process, you know how to get extra energy in that moments, and you don’t give up.

Self-guidance

An entrepreneur starts from 0, a blank page. She doesn’t find a guide there, no processes, no tools, no documents, no clients or sales, there is NOTHING. 

She creates the path. She has her own inner compass that guides her. In fact, it is that compass that takes her off the beaten path against her comfort. 

Self-guidance involves other high-desirable skills as:

• Proactivity: you don’t wait for anyone to solve your problems. You just go out, face the challenges and find the answers and solutions by yourself.
  

• Self-motivation: you come motivated from home. You know why you do what you do, and you shape your environment to facilitate doing it.
  

• Autonomy: you can work on your own, others’ support, but don’t block. Others advise, but you don’t need them to tell you what to do.

Innovation

Once entrepreneurs have the path, they have to create everything from scratch, everything comes out of their heads. Not only the product but also the entire structure that a company requires to operate, from people and skills to HOW they all operate: the culture!

• Creativity: you find new ways to solve problems. you are curious, you experiment, and try out new things without the fear of failure. You learn fast, think outside the box and use a different approach to problems.
  

• Customer orientation: You need to be customer-oriented, value their voices, their feedback, and be close to them to guide your decisions. You think outside of the box and use a different approach to problems.
  

• Faith: You act with confidence, even when no one believes in yourself or is even able to understand your product. You are not afraid of failure or mistakes along the way, you are fully aware that success will not come at first.
  

• Continuous improvement: Everything could be better. You are not self-indulgent. You always want it better and are ambitious. Nothing is set in stone. You are aware of the VUCA environment you live in and the competitive advantage of adapting quickly.

Communication

Entrepreneurs require others to fulfil their dream. — From a team that helps them co-create and sell the product, investors who finance the activity, customers who buy… They need highly developed communication skills to be able to adapt to all these environments and reach their main goals.

Skills that make you a great communicator:

• Adaptability: Different profiles, different personalities, different objectives. You need to be capable to adapt to each environment, from reporting to business stakeholders to a motivational speech to your engineering team.
  

• Effective communication, verbal and non-verbal. Clear and concise messages. Empathic, honest, and vulnerable attitude. You know that the important ones are the others, and you give them the importance they require.
  

• Optimist: Sometimes irrational belief in your purpose, there is no challenge, problem, or challenge that can sink you. You always think positive, see opportunities and value the learning gained: the experience points only add up, each action and decision bring success closer.
  

• Team player: You know that you can go further and faster with a team. You value that each person has a special superpower. You know that you depend on others to make your dream come true. Likewise, you delegate with confidence and are demanding, you make others participate in the triumphs, you accompany and facilitate them to achieve the goals.
  

• Inspiration: With your attitude, you set an example and don't stop at empty words. You work harder and are more efficient. You protect your wellness and manage your time effectively. You take time to keep growing. All of that inspires others to be better. You are a multiplier. 

Successfully leading tech teams requires much more than this entrepreneurial mindset, but having this mindset will make the difference from the first contact, and it all evolves at all leadership levels.

At the end, developing this key mindset will help you become a unicorn in the industry! 🦄 

CTOs are often connected to the business, speak the language, communicate effectively and make decisions from a business point of view…  From the interviews, CTOs are expected to have some experience to fully own the vision from a technical point of view, lead their teams autonomously, motivate team members, be an example of a high-performing individual for their teams, etc.

The problem is further down the ladder. Managers, team leaders, and developers often don't have enough exposure to the business and don't make decisions with the business in mind, leading to poor performance.

Read more

Transforming this high-level vision into reality was one of my superpowers as CTO.

How it happened?

Since I was at university, I knew my role should be leading teams, so I started to look for opportunities where I could develop key skills. I learnt one of them was managing projects, so I proposed myself for it in practical exercises, and also started a small company.

By the time I finished my studies, I had already led a couple of projects involving +40 people and had learnt many things about running a business, like creating a brand, promoting the service in both offline and online channels, talking to customers, or coordinating the work of +20 part-time contractors.

It all started back in 2009, when I got my first job as a software engineer. I was doing mainly backend development, but I was genuinely curious about product development and other software areas, as my goal was to be able to create applications and digital products autonomously.

I liked backend & frontend, and I engaged with the incipient mobile apps world since the beginning. Although I wasn't too fond and didn't like it that much, I also had to design databases and deploy apps on different types of servers, both on-premise and several cloud providers. I needed all the different areas to become a great full-stack developer, so I went through it. 

Later on, starting as co-founder CTO required even a wider approach to technology: product design, metrics, data modeling, systems design, modular architectures, or APIs, amongst many others.

With all these areas of knowledge, and hands-on experience in each and every of them over time, I developed a 360° vision that allowed me as a leader to empathize with all the different areas and professionals responsible for the execution along the different stages of the journey: from getting the requirements, estimating or planning, to the development and deployment.

And that was key to executing dozens of projects and launching many different products during my career at companies like Wefitter, I-surance, Wefox or Revolut. Of course they weren’t perfect or always on budget or on time, but they mostly succeeded in helping the business achieve the goals planned.

My other superpower: Translating business into technology 💥

My CEO and managers felt that I understood them when explaining business vision, interpreted their business requirements correctly, and spoke their language when explaining technical issues. — That’s Business Communication.

Also, the product team felt comfortable when I explained the high-level vision and the dependencies of some areas with others — when they saw realistic calendars and could have valuable technical conversations.

Both parties saw in me a partner who was fighting for their interests. I was the bridge many organizations miss between business and technology.

I developed these 2 superpowers as a consequence of my early exposure to leading projects and building companies. And they were the reason I could grow as a CTO: even when I was not a proper “leader”, at least I could manage all things product and tech with reasonable success.

Now that I have a much better understanding of what being an engineering leader means, I would like to share with you the 3 key elements to achieve a high-level technical vision.

Let’s dive deep into each of them:

🐦 Bird-eye-view

One of the most important things for leaders in tech is to get out of their area of expertise (backend, frontend, data) and see the product from a higher-level perspective to generate expansion. 

What do I mean by expansion?

Great tech leaders expand horizontally the boundaries of the technologies they know, allowing them to see technology as a whole. They focus on how well the whole engine works to fulfill business needs, not how each part performs individually. Interactions between the different technologies (and the members or teams responsible for each of them) matters, as well as the processes behind. You should keep an eye on it, as it’s your responsibility to care for the combined output, delegating the low-level details of each area to your team. 

Great tech leaders also expand vertically. They look a bit further and see the long-term impact of the work done, decisions made, their consequences, and risks taken, among others. 

To take all key aspects into account and balance your involvement in the different areas impacting the outcome of your team, I recommend using a simple framework that has worked well for me in the past. 

It defines the operation of a business through 3P: People-Product-Process.

Some examples of things to take into account in each of the three areas:

People

• Have the right people with the right skills

• Create an environment that helps them perform at their best

Product

• Translate business and product requirements to technical tasks along with your team. You can not be the only translator!

• Prioritize effectively what to do according to business impact

Process

• Define efficient and standard ways of handling each step: from communication between departments to deployment. How do we collect information? How do we decide? How do we report results?

• In order to do that, frameworks and methodologies like DevOps, Agile or Dora metrics allow you to get demonstrated results out of the box (well, you must adapt to your current environment)

As you can see, the 3Ps framework allows you to keep everything in mind and avoid blind spots.

🗓 Project Planning

Given that resources (mainly time and money) are never infinite, your role managing projects is finding the right tradeoff for each case.

In order to facilitate it, another framework that works very well is what is known as the Golden Triangle of project management:

What this golden triangle teaches you is that the Quality delivered is limited by 3 variables:

• The scope of work aka the features to build

• The deadline established to deliver

• The budget available

It can help you to make decisions when any of the variables change, i.e. if you have been told to include an urgent feature, either time has to be extended or the budget has to be increased in order to keep the same quality. Otherwise, the final product will suffer. This way you can negotiate those other variables, say “no” in case that cannot be guaranteed, or find alternatives.

🗣Communication

Communication is the key ingredient to translating tech into business. 

To gain the support and trust of stakeholders, you must continually and effectively communicate how your role in providing technology resources helps all of you to achieve business objectives. 

Some tips here you can take to boost your communication with stakeholders:

• You are the technical expert. Act as one. — They expect clear and concise answers from you. So synthesize your ideas and bring only the relevant information. Think about what is really important to them, bring only a small number of topics and keep the message short.
  
  

• Avoid technical jargon as much as you can. Bring metaphors, use examples and analogies to be understood, and of course avoid as much as possible all our tech acronyms and concepts like SDK, API, IDE, Kubernetes, or Microservices.
  
  

• Speak their language: Time & Money. The more you link every idea to the impact of those variables, the easier it will be for them to understand you — and the bigger chances you will have to get the buy-in. At the end, is on their interest. 

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If you would like to dive deep into technical vision, within Ignite Mentoring Program we work on this topic! — During sessions 3 & 4, you will work around these and other frameworks in-depth and will prepare a real project where you will have to cover all these areas in detail, as well as communicate it to a business stakeholder.

Learn more here.

📚 Free Resources To Grow As A Great Engineering Lead

🎥 Webinar: From 0 to 100: Your First 100 Days as Tech Lead

Have you just landed as a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager, and are you struggling in this new role?

Join me next October 19th at 18:00 CET, and let’s co-create a 100-day action plan to successfully land a tech leadership role and multiply your impact from day one. 

🔗 Join the session here

🎙The Ultimate Guide to Building High-Performance Teams in Tech

Building high-performance teams is far from trivial. 

Your job as a leader is to get the performance metrics right and to spot people who look for growth opportunities from the beginning.

However, you must remember that building high-performance teams isn’t just about hiring; the team and the environment they work in must enable them to make the most of their talents. 

How can you get everything right to build high-performance teams? 

Get my approach to building high-performance teams, plus some tips you can apply to foster it in your team by listening to my latest entry at Level UP Engineering Podcast!

🔗 Get the complete article and podcast here

That’s all for now!

See you in the next LIDR Pill 👋

Alvaro,

In 2015 I was working as a CTO in WeFitter, a startup I co-founded.

It was my first relevant experience leading tech teams. The challenge was big, and I was really blocked. I didn't fully understand what was expected from my role. 

I didn't know how to allocate my time, and I had the feeling of moving from one meeting to another without adding real value to the team.

Does it sound familiar to you?

After talking openly about it with my co-founders, they put me in touch with one of the company’s advisors, an experienced CTO who had been in my situation before. 

He was the one that really helped me to land the role properly, bringing the clarity to understand the skills needed to succeed as a CTO, and supporting me during the growth process. 

Step by step, I started to improve at all levels in order to help myself, the team, and the company to meet expectations and achieve goals.

I remember he told me that I needed to lead the meetings with a primary focus on unlocking difficult situations and being a facilitator to get everything my team needed to move forward.

Essentially, I had to lead by example so they could follow me. 

As a leader, you must light the way of your team, so they can move forward, overcoming the obstacles they find along the path.

This is what I call to be a servant leader. 

Have you heard about this concept before?

The term Servant Leader was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf, who mentioned that the servant leader is, above all, a "servant", highlighting the natural human feeling of wanting to serve others.

This type of leadership is more than just an influencing style, it is a way of life that seeks to bring out the best from each member of the team. 

A servant leader is concerned that her collaborators are healthy, feel free and have greater autonomy in carrying out their tasks, putting their needs first, and helping people to shine and reach the top. It’s a facilitator, an enabler.

Now the question: Are you a servant leader? 

Here you are seven characteristics that define a servant leader, so you can find it out: 

🗻 Is the first among equals

She does not feel above others but conceives those who lead as peers with whom she can both teach and learn — Believing that being the leader doesn't make her better than them, they just perform different functions, all of them needed for the mission to succeed.

🗻 Creates specialists 

The servant leader focuses on the strengths of her collaborators, and, when necessary, assumes the follower role, letting everyone do what they do great, thus creating specialists who shine in their areas of expertise. 

🗻 Seeks common well-being

She conceives her position as a means to obtain general wellness and not as a means for personal gain.

🗻 Active listening is one of her superpowers

She is willing to listen and seek opinions and ideas from the team.

🗻 Is flexible, adaptable, and open to continuous improvement

If she is convinced that others are right, she will accept diverse opinions and access those suggestions. 

🗻 Fosters mentorship 

She helps her collaborators to accomplish things they didn't know they could by setting achievable and challenging goals. 

🗻 Inspires others to serve

She knows she can't do it all alone. Even if she could, she wouldn't want to since she wants to work with and for others. So to achieve big goals, she seeks to inspire those she serves to serve others. She creates new leaders.

Read more

Four years ago, when I co-founded a startup and things started working well, my co-founders and I had to leave the country. They moved to San Francisco, and I moved to Finland to join an acceleration process. 

We made many mistakes in this shift of becoming a distributed team in different time zones.

The main one: Not working well enough with the team to maintain effective communication. 

The fact that the founders and the team were in different time zones without being prepared caused communication to be lost. 

We lost trust in the team, and they lost it in us, as we were no longer talking on a personal level – getting the work process to suffer. 

The planning, prioritization, time management, everything was affected, and therefore the delivery of the team was slower and with less quality. 

How did we act? 

We blame the team instead of understanding that the problem came from us by not helping them to adapt to this new way of working. 

We fell into a vicious circle of blaming them when expectations were not met; getting job resignations from some team members, and dropping motivation. 

Big mistake.

We returned to the country, and the work environment was completely different.

Low energy in the team, less risk-taking, more conservative estimates, and a lot of frustration.

I needed to change that situation, that toxic culture of blaming we were living. So, I proposed a solution of doing the opposite of what was being done. 

I wanted to focus on finding the root of the problem and work from there, applying the motivation model 2.0 to each team member. 

But what I proposed was doubted. 

My cofounders doubted this system could be functional, and I never could at least “try it”. 

I was criticized for my leadership style (more empowering, more ownership), so I had to leave the startup too.

I gave up EVERYTHING.

Stock options, time invested, etc.

And I had to start over from scratch.

My values were above any financial reward, and working in a way where I didn't love what I was doing.

I no longer felt I could care and help people grow. — what I really love about leading.

A toxic culture is easily noticed. 

Communication is not assertive, teams are not synced, managers spend much time micromanaging, and the trust and motivation of the team are reduced.

But…

A good engineering culture is extremely valuable! 

Besides keeping your developers close, It sets everyone up for success and holds the team accountable for its stated goals.

Culture is a set of practices and behaviors in a company's operation. 

It's something you experience daily; it's the air you breathe in the company; it's your engineers working happily and healthily, doing meaningful work, and growing professionally and personally.  

However, achieving a good engineering culture is not something simple, nor is there a single way to achieve it. It all depends on you and the company. 

But, what exists are good practices you should keep in mind when implementing a culture within your team.

Practices I implemented when building an engineering culture in the next companies I joined as CTO and that helped everyone to thrive. 

👉 Reflect on your company values

Fostering a good engineering culture is part of the values ​​and beliefs of the company and the team members.

Reflect on the most important beliefs to your team and opt for actionable values. — i.e., collaboration, transparency, continuous improvement, etc.

And here’s something important:  If you say something is important to you and you’d like the rest of your team to care about it, be the first person to live that value. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when nobody else does either.

👉 Start with you

Culture & Values are all about living them. Walk the walk, and lead by example.  

If you want to ground a certain culture, you must always be the first to lead by example. Your behavior must align with the behaviors and values you would like your team to adopt.

— If you want people to have a good work-life balance and you don't want them to work late, you can't send them an email late. 

— If you want your direct reports to be well prepared and run their 1:1, you must be the first to prepare YOUR 1:1 with your manager. 

You are a referent for your team, and you will be imitated whether you are a role model or not. 

👉 Foster autonomy

The most effective leaders build a team culture based on autonomy to achieve their expectations.

Fostering autonomy in your engineers will make them go from being accountable for their responsibilities to wanting to be accountable, as they will begin to acquire and own their initiatives. 

e.g., at LIDR, we encourage each manager to be the CEO of their own department. It gives them a sense of belonging, and autonomy to establish their processes and build awareness.

Your role as a manager is to facilitate mastery, so they can put it into practice autonomously.  As well as facilitate an environment in which they can make decisions and accept failure as part of the learning and process to be more autonomous.

👉 Trust & Transparency

Transparency by default, is a key value. Try to keep everything as open as possible with the team.

In our case, we use Notion as our documentation center. We have our entire operation there, and everyone can access it, thus fostering trust and transparency.

Another example of transparency is to have your engineering career ladder accessible from a well-known location.

It should NOT be a mystery how to get promoted in the company, and the standards should be universally applicable. It hurts your culture if someone can be promoted by achieving less in a different group; it can create a "toxic" culture that you definitely don't want.

👉 Encourage assertive communication

Last but not least, encourage communication as effective and assertive as possible.

It has a HUGE impact on your team's experience, motivation, trust, and commitment.

When teams communicate effectively,  they can create goals and outcomes that more members agree on, promoting better teamwork. 

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. 

Keep it as one of your key priorities at all times

Culture is the “why” behind every action taken by anyone. Those infinite, small actions are what ultimately determine success.

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Would you like to go one step further to start building and nurturing a strong engineering culture?

This is the topic we are working on this month in LIDR Academy, as part of the Leadership course, and we will put it into practice in our upcoming live workshop.

If you would like to dive deep into this topic while mastering the rest of the skills and processes needed to become a great leader in tech, I strongly recommend you look at LIDR Academy.

📚 Free Resources To Grow As A Great Engineering Lead.

🎥 Spotify Engineering Culture

Learn how the engineering culture is built on spotify. This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, so the video is somewhere between "How Things Are Today" and "How We Want Things To Be".

🔗 Watch the videos  • 30 min 

🎥 Building an engineering culture at Scotiabank

Oswaldo Alvarez shares some insights on how to build a great engineering culture based on his experience leading big tech teams. During this interview, we cover topics like: 

•  What is culture? 

•  How can you align culture with people’s behavior?

• What do you think about tying people’s behaviors with performance reviews?

• Why do you think having agile as one of the two main goals is important?

• Some tips for setting a proper engineering culture within companies 

🔗 Watch the interview here • 45 min 

However, effective communication implies assertive communication. — A key component for engineering leaders: Say the right thing at the right time, in the right way.

Being assertive allows us to express our opinions, needs and feelings without ignoring or harming the opinions, needs, and others' feelings.

💊 For this pill 26, we have a special guest: Jose Arcos, Lead WordPress Developer at Ekkiden, who will share from his experience leading Dev teams how assertiveness is the key ingredient in his daily language and communication with his team.

Enjoy it!

Assertiveness in the workplace

Is assertiveness a buzzword among psychologists or coaching experts, or is it really a quality worth paying attention to?

I always wonder when I read about new terms: how much they will squeeze it until it becomes a hackneyed term, at what point it will become a catchphrase for snake oil salesman. 

However, with assertiveness, I don't feel the same, I learned about this quality a few years ago, and since then, I have observed myself and my environment on how we can use it in our daily language and work communication.

What is Assertiveness

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as follows: 

“the quality of expressing opinions or desires in a strong and confident way, so that people take notice”

Although this expression falls short, it lacks the best part of the definition. Expressing opinions assertively includes at least two characteristics, that the sender does not give up his or her principles or internal standards, and that the receiver does not feel that his or her own is being invaded. 

A definition I like better is included in Dorland's Medical Dictionary:

“a form of behavior characterized by a confident declaration or affirmation of a statement without need of proof; this affirms the person's rights or point of view without either aggressively threatening the rights of another (assuming a position of dominance) or submissively permitting another to ignore or deny one's rights or point of view”.

What is the key?

In our language and actions, assertiveness helps us respect the rights of others. Although assertiveness is bidirectional, in this Lidr Pill, we will focus on how to use this quality towards others, i.e., not threatening the rights of others.

Using assertiveness when leading teams

Effective communication helps to detect problems before they grow, to handle incidents in their early stages, and not when the fire is raging out of control.

In order to communicate assertively, one has to change the paradigm. So far, when leading teams, we have been told about the importance of transmitting charisma, leadership, and strength in our words. — But how do the receivers, our teammates, whether they are subordinates or not, feel about our communication? 

Instead of starting a sentence by saying "I want you to give top priority to this task", we could rephrase it in its assertive stream "I think this task has a higher priority, what do you think?". 

At first glance, it may seem like a disadvantage, the second option forces a conversation, while the first is an imperative statement.

Benefits of implementing assertive language

As managers, using assertive communication with the team will keep the lines of communication always open, a team or worker who feels respected, will be willing to express themselves freely. 

Leave a comment

If you liked this topic, I invite you to take a look at the following resources:

📚 Free resources to grow as a great Engineering Lead.

📙 The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes.

This indispensable book gives you a simple three-step method for saying a Positive No. It will show you how to assert and defend your key interests; how to make your No firm and strong; how to resist the other side's aggression and manipulation; and how to do all this while still getting to Yes.

🔗 Get the book here

🎥 The Beauty of Assertiveness

While many people believe that assertiveness is rude and ugly, Dr. Abby presents in this TEDx talk the beauty of assertiveness as a way to show the world that we are smart, kind, and important.

🔗 Watch the video • 15 min.

🤝 Join Together by Tech_community & find your ideal job.

With TogetherbyTech, Ekkiden is enabling thousands of people across
Europe to grow and boost their careers by offering them the opportunity to
learn, connect and find a job that suits them.

🔗 Join the community here

🎁 Live the Ignite Mentoring Program Experience

We've collected some examples of the main formats used in the Ignite Mentoring Program, so you can live the experience for free. 🤩

It is more than an hour of free content where you will learn some of the processes and skills to master to become a great tech leader.

🔗 Live the Ignite Program experience in English

🔗 Vive la experiencia del programa Ignite en Español.

The final result wasn’t what was expected, and the project was a complete failure because of my communication issues with the team.

What happened exactly? 

I didn't know how to give them feedback in the right way, and I made some mistakes: 

• I wasn't concrete or clear about why we were doing that task (I affected their motivation).

• I didn't give them freedom or autonomy.

• I didn't celebrate their milestones and only looked at what they had to improve.

But it wasn't the worst. 

I shared my critiques in public — at team meetings, and I couldn't wait to say what I felt at that moment.

What do you think was the team's satisfaction with this project?

None!

I was killing any motivation from the team, unintentionally, just by not being aware of the level of my interpersonal skills.  

After realizing the low results, I had to take action. So I focused on building my effective communication skills and took feedback and active listening courses.

I relied on mentors to put into practice what I was learning and regularly reviewed the results and progress with the CEO as part of my biannual performance review. 

Since then, giving feedback has been a skill I haven't stopped putting into practice, and it is undoubtedly the secret to continuous improvement. 

When you become a manager, you have to understand how to deliver the message properly and turn feedback into actionable next steps.

It's actually something you can use to your advantage. 

However, It's not easy to do it when you don't have any proper training, practice, or even a framework you can follow, taking the risk of falling into two very common mistakes:

❌ Giving feedback so soft and indirect that your collaborator doesn't even recognize that he/she is receiving feedback and ignore it. 

❌ Or otherwise, being so direct to the point that your employee takes a defensive position. 

Over the years and after going through different tech teams and personalities, I have created my own framework for giving feedback and communicating a hard message properly; a recipe you can put into practice today with your team:

1. Ask for permission

Start by asking permission from the other person.

«Do you have a couple of minutes? I have some ideas to improve the process» 

«I want to tell you something about the performance of the meeting, can we talk?»

These type of questions will anticipate to your collaborator's brain that there is feedback to come and, thus, create a moment of acceptance and autonomy. 

2. Implement the SBI framework model:

[𝗦] Situation: Define when and where the situation happened. Be as specific as possible. 

[𝗕] Behavior: Describe how that behavior occurred objectively and specifically. Keep to the facts, and don't insert opinions or judgments.

[𝗜] Impact: Show the impact of the person's behavior on you, your team, and the organization.

3. End with a question

«What do you think about it?» 

«I consider we should do this, but what do you think?»

Closing with a bouncing question will turn the situation into a joint problem-solving moment where your collaborator also has the chance to share her opinion and decision.

It will create commitment on her part rather than compliance.

Managers also have room for improvement. 

Those who know how to give proper feedback also ask for it regularly.

As a manager, you also have things to improve, so I recommend you to ask for constant feedback from your team members. — It will help you set up a better continuous improvement process and achieve higher performance. 

Did you know that within Ignite Mentoring Program, we dive deep into communication, conflict resolution, and how to give feedback?

If you are about to transition into tech leadership roles or are a first-time manager, I encourage you to look at everything you can achieve and develop by joining the program.

Click here to learn more. 

That’s all for now

I hope this framework could help you level up your skills for giving feedback and make it useful, effective and more productive.

What is your opinion? What is your experience? Do you use any specific framework for giving feedback?

Leave a comment

📚 Free resources to grow as a great Engineering Lead.

📄 SBI Framework + Examples

Get some examples to implement the SBI Framework correctly by hitting my last Linkedin Post. 

🔗 Read the post • 2 min. 

📙 Book recommendation: Radical Candor by Kim Scott 

Radical Candor™ is caring personally while challenging directly. At its core, Radical Candor is guidance and feedback that’s both kind and clear, specific and sincere.

🔗 Get the book here

🔍 IT Burnout Index by Yerbo

Get your personal burnout risk with a free, science-based assessment developed by our partners of Yerbo.

🔗 Take the test • 3 min. 

Thank you for reading, hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Alvaro, 

The capacity to learn is a gift
The ability to learn is a skill
The willingness to learn is a choice

—  Brian Herbert

In the tech lead role, the learning format also changes compared to the developer stage. 

Change the content to learn (code and best practices, frameworks vs. leadership, soft skills), change the time you can dedicate to it (with StackOverflow or pair programming, learning is an inherent part of the task, now not so much), change the format in which you can find the content (StackOverflow vs. books ).

What does not change: Conscious learning!!!

• Conscious: What does what I am reading learning can help me?  How useful is it, or will it be?  How am I going to apply it?

Learning to learn is not just “acquiring information.” It is mastering the correct way to put into practice skills and abilities that allow selecting, organizing, and correctly interpreting information.

In this pill 24 💊, I’ll share with you some of the best practices to learn how to learn and strengthen the learning curve within your tech leadership career.

Besides knowing these practices, I will tell you about the method I created to take smart notes and structure the content in such a way you can get real value from your ideas. — The same method I used to categorize the content I consumed during the last 9 years to create Lidr Academy.

Are you ready? Let's go!

Read more

I was CTO and I worked around 11hrs a day. Basically, two shifts in just one.

Every day I had an average of 8 to 10 things to do — A list that was growing up as the week went by.

Everything had the same priority and I used to live in an infinite loop of discarding tasks that made me feel really overwhelmed!

Even when I went out for a walk or did other activities, I felt guilty for not getting those tasks done or finished before.

The urgencies didn’t allow me to enjoy my quality and personal time (family, hobbies, learning), and I felt frustrated!

Worse yet, I felt like a fraud to my team because I wasn't up to their technical level. I couldn't help them to manage their time effectively or become better professionals, so the company's results were suffering. 

Actually, as it was so much the pressure I felt, my wife had to set the limits with a special gift for my birthday:

When you land into a management role, there is no awareness that everything changes, and with it, your agenda and priorities.

The manager’s duties require focus, clarity and creativity... you can't do it with your head full of things and dedicating the "leftover time" after 5 meetings in a row. 

You have to make room for the new (both mental and temporal)

Just think about the impact on your team: if you don't manage your agenda effectively, much less you will be able to optimize your team's and their work. — Your chaos will be reflected in them.

Managers are role models in every aspect, whether we like it or not. You have a huge impact on the lives of every single member of your team (and beyond), but that can backfire if the model is not the right one.

If you stay until 20:00, don't expect them to react to your policy that they should leave early. 

If you don’t prioritize your own learning and growth, don’t expect them to be proactive when choosing courses or training.

Lead by example!

My goal with this newsletter is that you get the most important tasks of the week done and gain focus time to do it. 

For that, you will apply the 4 pillars I follow for effective time management through practical exercises.

Are you ready?

Baseline

Let’s start by reflecting on your current situation!

Start your week answering the following questions:

• How productive do you feel, from 1 to 10?

• How would you evaluate your focus, from 1 to 10?

• How much control over your agenda do you feel you have, from 1 to 10?

It’s important you write down your answers, so, on Friday and after applying the 4 pillars, you can do a retrospective exercise and compare your progress. 

4 Pillars For Effective Time Management:

1. Set clear priorities

Setting clear priorities helps you focus on what matters most, preventing you from thinking so much about your entire to-do list. As you are not going to do it right now, it only makes you feel overwhelmed. How to do it?

📝 Quick exercise: MIT (Most Important Task)

• Just define at the end of the day the first thing you will do the next day, the most critical one, and write it down.

• Then, every day, first thing in the morning, you just do it. 

• Remember, first means no email, no slack, no meetings. Just. Do. It. If there is something else on your agenda the first time in the morning, try to move it and make sure you block that first hour for the subsequent days and weeks.
  
  You may have tried doing this before without even knowing that the MIT strategy was actually a thing :).

2. Blocking time

Get back control of your time. You need to focus work on the manager’s important things: systems design, performance reviews, goal setting…And that focus needs enough time to get into the flow, not just 15 minutes slots spreaded all over the week!

📝 Quick exercise:

• Try to block 3 slots of 2 hours for deep & shallow work (like MIT). That means 15% of your week.

• Think about moving some 1:1s, avoiding non-critical meetings or delegating part of your tasks.

• Try to gain this time in the moments of the day when you feel more productive. Trying to focus for 2 hours in a row immediately after lunch is an impossible mission (did you hear about food comma?)

• Finally, add a 10-minute buffer after meetings to reorder the notes, write down TODOs, and take a break before the next thing. Change the environment, drink some water, close your eyes and breathe for 1-2 minutes. — Don’t take your phone, walk a bit, stretch your arms and neck. This will close the chapter and re-energize you for the next one.

3. Distractions

Do you struggle with managing your attention, energy, and time effectively?
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed and don't have the resources to increase your concentration?

If your answer is yes to any question, you might have problems with distractions. But no worries, we all face them — even daily! Slack notifications, social media, messages, etc… they are time robbers if not managed properly.

How to avoid them?

📝 Quick exercise:

• Set Do Not Disturb status every time you are focused (like in the blocks of the previous exercise, MIT, lunch, meetings…).

• Use time management tools to keep focused: The Pomodoro technique can help you.

• Set a time for communications: messages, emails, etc. 2-3 times per day should be more than enough. If they happen in moments of low focus i.e., after lunch, much better.

• Set clear expectations by communicating the measures to your team and stakeholders, so they know there will be a delay. Add a way to communicate urgencies (real urgencies!), so they know when they can count on you. 
  

4. Avoid multitasking

Context switching, task switching, multitasking… whatever you want to call these behaviors, they’re incredibly hard on your already-taxed brain. And while the immediate costs might feel small, the compounding impact on your productivity is staggering.

📝 Quick exercise:

• Get focus on just one thing, the most important (MIT again), only one at a time. If you complete one task daily, at the end of the week you will have completed the 5 most important tasks.
  

Have you ever applied any of these exercises?

Final Exercise

Once you have started on Monday with your reflection on your current situation, applied the 4 pillars, and followed the exercises, it is time to close the week with a reflection of your performance.

On Friday, at the end of the day, ask yourself:

• How productive do you feel, from 1 to 10?

• How would you evaluate your focus, from 1 to 10?

• How much control over your agenda do you feel you have, from 1 to 10?

• Compare the results with the values written on Monday

• Propose 3 measures to increase the values by 1 point

• Repeat next week!  🌀

This is the topic we are working on this month in Lidr Academy, as part of the Self-leadership course. And we will put it into practice in our upcoming live workshop.

How? Each member will create his new agenda based on these and other recommendations and evaluate it in a 3-weeks period. Want to join us? Click here to know more. 

🤚 But…

If you want to speed up your tech leadership career, we also work in-depth into time management in the session 3 of our Ignite Mentoring Program. The high-performance training that prepares you to handle Tech Lead or Engineering Management positions.

Interested in knowing more about the program? Click here

That’s all for now!

Hope you get the most out of this newsletter and put into practice the tips and exercises I just shared.

These pillars have helped me A LOT to find balance and manage my time properly in the last 7 years, and I hope today these pillars become a source of change for your time management.

Willing to hear any improvement you make, just reply to this email or leave a comment. :)

Leave a comment

See you in the next pill 💊   

📚 Free resources to grow as a great engineering leader.

📃 120 Linkedin posts for Engineering Leaders.

I have collected the best 120 LinkedIn posts I’ve shared on my networking during the last 2 years, all related to tech leadership. — Curated and categorized according to our leadership skills framework. 

🔗 Get the resource • 8 hours.

📒 Time blocking 101.

Get a step-by-step guide to getting the most from your daily schedule.

🔗 Read here • 5 min

📄 How do you prioritize your time?

Get 25 killer tips for optimal time prioritization written by John Rampton.

🔗 Read here • 6 min

From state-of-the-art technology to specialized facilities or qualified support staff, they are a basic tool for athletes and teams of any discipline.

Can we bring this concept to the world of work, particularly to software teams?

Of course! 💪 

In this pill #22, we'll explore the mindset and attitude that make certain individual contributors and teams to be considered high performers.

We'll discuss what qualities identify these people and look at some key actions you can take immediately to increase performance, both yours and your teams’. 

This pill is informal leadership in its purest form! — Let's dive deep! 👇 

Read more

You know you have a good job, but you don't really think you have the skills needed to perform. 

You deliver the tasks, you do what is asked of you, but the feeling is still there. 

Has it ever happened to you?

That's the imposter syndrome: the feeling that you are not worth, you are incapable, or not enough WHEN IN REALITY you are worth, you are capable, and you are enough. 

Most first-time managers face it, and I need to tell you: IT’S ABSOLUTELY NORMAL.

Managing a tech team is hard, managing a remote one even more so. 

It's tough not to feel it when you find yourself out of the code for several days in a row. Or when you don't review technical documentation so often. Or when you literally spend whole days jumping from meeting to meeting, from Slack to email.

You feel "outdated" and that your work has no impact.

I get you. — I am someone who has felt the imposter syndrome in almost all my stages: first-time CTO, first member of my team, first big project to deliver, first presentation to investors…

In fact, at Lidr.co, I have felt (and still feel) the syndrome more than ever! 

At the end, I am wearing MANY hats for the first time, all of them out of tech, my domain, and I am not taking a proper formal training for any of them. Being a great speaker, salesperson, or CEO that way, all at the same time, is not something easy to deal with.

💭 A couple of examples I remember:

When we started creating Ignite, it was initially a master, and I had the goal of bringing top reference CTOs in the industry, those who built amazing products like Typeform, Badi or Carto, to be mentors of the master.

My heart raced just of thinking if such top-notch talents would believe in me and in a product that had not even come to market yet.

But who were I to convince them? How could I be a priority for them? They were rockstars, for sure they would have much better things to invest their time on.

Some months later, when we ran the #CTOweek, our first official event in Lidr.co, I felt the imposter syndrome at its peak!

I was supposed to be the guest star, but the camera panicked me A LOT. Speaking in English for 90 minutes, 4 days in a row, sounded terrifying. 

I worked many, many hours to improve the slides, the speech, and the technical setup as much as I could, literally until the last minute. It was never good enough. 

All that perfectionism didn’t make my stomach stop tingling, or my hands stop sweating. 

Then the show started, and more than 300 people joined.

I had never been in such a big Zoom meeting, and everyone was expecting me to deliver real value.

I just wondered: “What am I going to teach these people who don't even know me? Mine is just an opinion, there are thousands out there from well-known and trusted industry leaders. — Why listening to me?“

All of this happens when we face new situations in life. — You are trying to perform a new task, something you don't know (yet) 100% how to do.

Do you think that if you are required to write the same lines of code for yet-another-endpoint, week after week, as you have been doing for the last 3 years, you would feel that tickle in your belly or that bitter feeling that you won't succeed?

NO!!! ❌

It's normal to feel the imposter syndrome when you are trying something new, mainly because you don't know what might happen and even less if the results will finally come.

But the reality is that you have to face it and take action, otherwise, you will never know what could have happened.

In my case, I went ahead! — I got in touch (with fear tho) with those top CTOs. They made me realize that my hypotheses were wrong, they wanted to invest their time in Lidr.co because they believed in our mission! 

I also went ahead with the #CTOweek and It was a huge success! Actually, we got the first sold out of our Ignite Program. 

Taking action is good, what we have to do is obvious and clear. But, the problem here is to do it.

How do you prepare yourself mentally to take action? 

If I had to sum up in just one single piece of advice: Ask yourself, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

When you see that most of the time you have achieved and overcome what you were so afraid of, it will be easier each time to challenge yourself to face the new and unknown.

—  And the extended version?

Here you are some tips that helped me to deal with the syndrome all these years, in many different situations, and I would love you to take them with you today, so you don't postpone your goals or dreams anymore. 

✅ The first thing to do if you want to become a great leader, is to address those insecurities first. Talk to your manager and your team, be vulnerable, and don’t keep them just for yourself. You will learn that many of the assumptions about the future, only live in your mind. And they could also tell you what they expect, so you avoid the perfectionism trap.

✅ Get a mentor to discuss your fears or insecurities. She will help you to set an action plan to overcome them based on her experience dealing with similar situations, and that pair of fresh eyes could be the objective perspective you are missing to balance your thoughts. It’s an accelerated growth.

✅ Ask your mentor, manager, or team for feedback about your performance. They could also give you tips, examples, or resources to improve. Ask for help, or come to Lidr.co, that's exactly why I've created this space, so you can find a support network.

✅ Reflect on your goals achieved... DAILY, even if you think they are "insignificant”. Especially those that were hard to reach. When you come back to everything you have achieved over a longer period, i.e. one year, it will be easier for you to celebrate and gain confidence. Don’t just look above in the ladder, only to find out how far you are from the top. That will always be moving. —  Instead, take some time regularly to look below and see how far you are now from the ground. 

✅ Compare yourself… but only with yourself. Today you are BETTER than yesterday! That’s the one and only thing that matters, and what you need to ask yourself every night. Don’t waste your time comparing to others, it will never be a fair comparison, and it will make you feel worse. Instead, invest that time and energy wisely working on your improvement.

 ✅ Do the exercise of writing good things about yourself on paper, so you don't forget them. — Not only those you perceive, but also think about those moments in which someone else told you something good, and you did not value it.

 ✅ Don't stop doing new things! — Do things that are a challenge for you, things that involve leaving your comfort zone. Things that scare you and imply a change. Whatever it is, dare! Only then can you understand that you have much more capacity than you think to face the new and unknown.

If you want to become a great leader and build a high-performance team, you can do it against all natural odds of fear. Just, learn to live with the imposter syndrome, put yourself first before your fears, look for external perspectives, and TAKE ACTION!

Only when you feel free to do what you want, you really choose the path you deserve. And only then you will unleash your full potential.

P.S. If you are interested in growing as an Engineering Lead, I’d like to invite you to join the waiting list of Lidr Academy, our new cohort-based course with 100% actionable content that covers all areas needed to become a great leader in tech.
Self-confidence is just one of the many modules under our Self-Leadership course (One of the 6 areas of leadership in our own skills framework).

Sounds relevant? — Join here.

Alvaro,

Let's start with what really means Engineering Culture?  

Engineering culture is the set of common beliefs and values that will later impact the way people in the organization make decisions or actions around software development. — Ilan Pinto

Every software company has a unique, goal-oriented culture that can level up or break your company. 

Having an engineering culture is undoubtedly a key factor for companies' development and, thus, their growth. And to tell the truth, establishing a culture is not just creating a PowerPoint with bullet points, it is actually finding the proper process to set principles and values.

We don't touch culture, we don't see it, nor do we hear it, but it is the main reason why people don't leave companies! 

Oswaldo Alvarez, Head of Engineering, Digital Capabilities at Scotiabank and creator of Coffee Power Podcast, shared with us in an interview what is culture, why it is so important, and some tips to set an engineering culture based on his experience leading big tech teams.

We all want to experience an incredible engineering culture, but not everyone has the privilege of having it in their day-to-day lives.

A good software engineering culture is not a matter of decreeing it or putting it on a PowerPoint as I mentioned before, it is a matter of living it and infecting it day by day with a series of behaviors, actions, and practices that become part of the DNA of an organization.

There is no single way to achieve it, but in this video, Oswaldo Alvarez and our great mentor Anand Safi discuss about how every day Anand works to establish a healthy and amazing engineering culture in his company.

After listening to this chapter, I want to invite you to reflect on the next questions and share your thoughts in the comments section:

Does your company have principles and values?
How do you recognize them in your team?
What kind of practices do you implement in your team to live your company culture?

Leave a comment

As a complement to this interesting topic, in this episode of The Real Talk Show, I unfold what goes beyond the defined role of leaders and managers. Here I talk about work-life balance and freedom outside office hours as part of the cultural practices I’ve had the opportunity to set along in different companies with great success to increase retention.

I hope you enjoy this pill and get actionable insights to kick-start and build a great engineering culture in your company!

Have you ever heard about the GROW model?  

Well, it’s a coaching and mentoring tool that fosters open questions and active listening to identify your mentee’s goals, analyze the current situation and map out action plans. 

Last Wednesday, in Lidr Community PRO, Gonzalo Fernandez, founder of Appdermis, shared a session where he explained how the Grow model works and how we as managers can get the most out of it: 

🏆 Goals and aspirations 

It’s important for your mentee to know what he wants. That’s why it’s relevant you guide him to set his goals based on the SMART method. — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. It will allow you to design a plan and keep track of your progress. 

👤 Reality

Once the goal has been defined, you need to have a clear and precise idea of your mentee’s current situation to know how far or close he is to achieving the goal. 

Inquire about past actions and what obstacles might be holding back his development at the moment. 

📋 Options  

The third step is to draw up a list of possible options that could help your mentee address the goal set and choose which will best help him to move forward. 

🔀 Will 

Here I talk about actions and accountability. After having the goal set, the current situation, and the proper tools, it’s time to kick-start the action plan. 

Make sure your mentee has specific actions to take, a timeframe, and how you will measure them. 

In your role as a manager or leader, it’s necessary to practice your mentoring skills, using simple methods that lead to your team’s growth, both professionally and personally. It will boost your success as well! :) 

Actually, in our Ignite Mentoring Program, we teach you how to put these mentoring skills into practice among other management processes like 1:1s & performance reviews. 

I encourage you to take a look at our Ignite program and apply to the waitlist for the next editions in your preferred language. 👉 Join the waitlist!

Just a sneak peek 👀… by applying to the waitlist, you will be able to live a bit of the Ignite experience in the next few days… 😉 

🎥 Stakeholders Communication & Influence | Masterclass

Join Alfons Foubert, Engineering Managers Coach, and learn the basics of having an effective communication with your stakeholders.

🔗 Join the masterclass here.

🇪🇸 On-site meetup: 5 key points for an effective leadership in tech.

Join Cristobal Hernandez at an onsite meetup in Madrid, Spain, and learn tips to put into practice your tech leadership. You must register to get your free ticket. 🎟

🔗 Register here.

🎧 Remote Company Culture || Beyond Coding. Episode #42

Patrick Akil & Alvaro Moya had an interesting conversation about why & how Lidr.co was built as a fully remote company.

🔗 Listen to the full episode here • 58 min.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to grab breakfast with an amazing woman who shared a bit of her story and her mission of fostering tech leadership in European women. 

As a person who changed careers from business to the tech industry, early on Karla Schönicke was looking for role models of women in tech, women in leadership positions that would inspire her in her career. 

Then in 2018, at her new job, for the first time in her life, she met a female CTO in person but when asked whether she knew any other women CTOs, that woman replied with ‘Only one’. 

Karla was convinced that there had to be more than one woman CTO in Germany, let alone Europe, so she went through LinkedIn to look for them, finding that indeed there were not many women CTOs around.

However, she did find a bunch of them in the end, and in November 2019, 8 women CTOs sat around a table in a pre-pandemic restaurant in Berlin, and the Women CTO Dinner was born. — A vibrant community of high-ranking women in tech leadership in Europe who enjoy technical discussions, networking, and good food. 

Taking the International Women’s Day opportunity, I would like to invite all women in tech from our Lidr community to participate in the upcoming Virtual Women CTO Dinner taking place on March 15th at 19:00 CET. 

👉 Please, contact Karla Schönicke on LinkedIn to save your seat.

If you know a woman who knows how valuable this community can be for her, feel free to share this newsletter. She is more than welcome as well :)

At Lidr.co, we are deeply committed to getting women into tech leadership roles and making them more visible. I have personally got a lot of value out of being supported by women leaders during my career, and I want the world to know what they can get too. 

For one reason or another, you have been a key ingredient for Lidr’s success in the early days, and I want to thank you all for that. Either as ambassadors, collaborators, or Igniters, you moved the needle. 💛 

Best, 

Alvaro Moya

Many of the participants identified with the most common challenges that new tech leads often face, highlighting that many of them can be avoided if we start preparing for the role before taking the real leap.

These are some of the most common challenges:

1️⃣ Leave the developer’s routine. 

Break habits are one of the most challenging things in life — but not impossible!

Coding is not your priority anymore. You have to keep in mind that now you will have new and different functions that you have to deal with. Finding the balance of all these tasks and slowly letting go of the code will be one of your main challenges. 

2️⃣ Time Management

The tech lead role requires many changes, and acquiring time management as a new skill is a major one. 

It’s the moment to start saying NO, delegating, and prioritizing your most important work during your most productive hours.

3️⃣ Communication Skills

This is the No. 1 skill you must develop before jumping into leadership roles.

Communication is all around. Think that now you have to talk to your direct reports, stakeholders, and even communicate technical concepts to non-technical people.

4️⃣ Think ahead

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything —  Dwight D. Eisenhower.

You stop being a developer who makes a ticket that will be put into production tomorrow to think about the consequences of everything you do and everything you decide. That’s why planning here is essential. 

5️⃣ Lack of guidance

If your company/manager does not give you the guidance you need to prepare for this role in advance, the transition may be even tougher. Raise your hand, ask your manager to provide you with safe spaces to put your informal leadership into practice.

Stay tuned :)

In the next weekly pill, I will share some tips and tricks to overcome these challenges and make a successful transition!

🎥 From Dev to Tech Lead | Recording & Material

Did you miss the webinar from dev to tech lead? — We have enabled recording and extra resources on the official page, you just have to be registered to get the material.

🔗 Watch the replay • 90 min.

🎙 Are you a tech leader willing to share your trajectory and experiences with the sector?

Alfons Foubert, Lidr Mentor and the Leadership Coach in front of Techasting Podcast, is cooking the highly anticipated third season of the show. — If you’re interested or curious to participate, don’t hesitate to reach him at alfons.foubert@gmail.com

🔗 Participate in the podcast

I wish I had known better 12 years ago when I decided to take the leap into leadership by myself — and when I did it by trial and error! 🤷‍♂️

If you are thinking to jump into leadership roles, here are my three key recommendations to do a faster and more effective transition: 

1️⃣ Understand what awaits you

Search for information on the internet, read books, ask people around you who have experienced it before, or attend our free webinar: from Dev to Tech Lead ^^.

Having a clear understanding of what is expected from you, the key skills required, and the most significant differences you will find concerning your current role will allow you to decide if being a Tech Lead is for you.

2️⃣ Seek support and advice 

 Having a mentor and a support network to guide you through the process will make things easier and prevent you from making the most common mistakes — as well as offer companionship and emotional support.

It can be your current manager, a Tech Lead from within your company or externally, a member of an online community, or a professional mentor. You can have more than one to get different perspectives.

3️⃣  Get prepared in advance

That’s what I call informal leadership. If you are clear about the progression, start practicing NOW some of the key skills you will need!

We will see in the webinar what they are and how to train them, but I can give you a preview of some of them:

Broadening your technical vision, communicating technical concepts in a way that non-technical people can understand, mentoring your team, delegating, or resolving conflicts.

If you are transitioning from developer to tech lead or are new in the role, don’t forget to register for my webinar taking place on February 23!

I will share all the keys to making this transition effectively, the skills needed, some of the most common mistakes (so you don’t fall into them), and the best practices to stand out as a great tech lead!

…Or, if you know someone on your team that you see this webinar could impact their professional career, share this newsletter :)

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🔥 P.S... if you have already registered, you will receive a surprise on Monday where you will discover the great opportunity there is right now for aspiring tech leaders! Stay tuned.

Talk to you soon,
Alvaro Moya,

In this weekly pill, I want to share 4 actionable tips that will help you manage your time more effectively, plus some tools to facilitate the process. 

❌ 1. Block out distractions

Turn off your notifications at your peak productivity! For this, I have been using freedom.to to block distractions any time I need. 

I suggest you set blocks of time to check your email and notifications every couple of hours instead of checking them every 10 minutes.

✅ 2. Prioritize wisely

Prioritization is key to successful time management — Have you heard about the Eisenhower Matrix?

It helps you decide on and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all.

This week I shared on Linkedin a deep explanation about how this matrix works and how you can adapt it to your current role. Take a look here! 👀

⏱ 3. Track your time

How are you investing time in each activity? Are you spending a long time on tasks that don’t have positive returns? 

Tracking time is very effective for gauging how much time is spent on different activities during the day.

super-productivity.com is a great tool to plan and track your time! — The great thing is that you can also connect it with Jira, GitLab, and GitHub and get important updates on any of your Jira tickets.

🤝 4. Delegate

Delegating tasks means making the best use of time and skills. It also allows your team members to grow and learn new things. It’s a win-win for you, your team, and your company!

Actually, on February 16th, Jose Rausell, CTO at Citibox, will come to run an exclusive masterclass about effective delegation for our Community PRO members.

Taking advantage of the fact that you are reading this weekly pill, I’d like to invite you to join this masterclass and learn about delegation superpowers for effective leaders. RSVP here! 👈 

I hope these tips help you and your team boost your time management skills, and thus, peak high-performance!

See you next Friday! 

🎥 Focus in a world of distractions

A couple of months ago, 3 amazing coaches came to Lidr to share their insights and strategies regarding focus and energy optimization throughout a very practical session.

🔗 Watch the replay here • 60 min.

— That’s my reflection when developers are transitioning into a tech lead role and mention that they feel overloaded because they struggle to find time for coding and don’t balance the technical tasks with their new agenda.

How so? 🤔 

Like almost everything in tech, there is no precise definition of what it means to be a tech lead. This role depends on many factors, such as the organization’s maturity, its needs, culture, and others.

However, based on my own experience and exchanging opinions with some colleagues, I could define the tech lead as an experienced software engineer responsible for leading a development team and ensuring the quality of all technical deliverables.

i.e., the tech lead continues dedicating part of his time to technical tasks but now has new responsibilities apart from leading, managing projects, delegating, and developing other skills that I will tell you throughout this learning pill. 💊

I consider the tech lead role is the mix of 3 key areas:

👉 Leadership: 

Skills such as empathy, communication, listening, and effective delegation are crucial.

You must integrate your team with the business side, ensure that everyone is on the same page and the project evolves coherently. 

It’s important to mention that, depending on the company, this role may or may not include people management. — Camille Fournier

But if it does, running effective 1:1s, giving feedback, and mentoring are important actions here and will be part of your leadership and team development. 

👉 Development: 

As I mentioned before, a tech lead spends part of the time on technical tasks such as opening pull requests, collaborating with the team to identify and fix technical issues to ensure quality, which means having strong technical skills is a must.  

👉 Product: 

Part of your leadership is helping other stakeholders like the Product Manager. Basically, you are partners. 

Tech leads need to have a product vision, not just to level up their technical skills but to understand how the digital product is built and how it works.

This vision can help the TL and the PM assess the technical feasibility, make decisions together, understand requirements, and translate them into software. 

This role is essential within any tech team, but it requires a lot of challenges and effort!

It’s normal that a very new tech lead struggles to find time for coding and starts to let some tasks go, but once you get a balance among the new responsibilities, you will reach new highs in your career, and believe me, the process will be unforgettable and unstoppable. 🚀

Have you had the chance to take on this role, or are you transitioning?

Leave a comment

If you want to dive deep into the tech lead role, find below some extra resources I’ve curated for you.

👀 …But if you are looking to ramp up your tech leadership career and accelerate the process, take a look at our Ignite Program.

🎥 Tech Lead Week | Free live online training for aspiring leaders in tech

Master the transition to tech lead and succeed. — Replay our Tech Lead Week and get to know the 360 vision of the tech lead! More than 6 hours of recorded content are there! 

🔗 Go to the Tech Lead week • 6 hours.

📄 The Tech Lead rule: Management first, coding second

It’s important to recognize that you are now supposed to do a new type of work, that you have never done professionally before. It’s time for opening your mind for learning and practice new skills.

🔗 Read the article here • 4 min.

📄 A Project Manager’s Best Friend: The Technical Lead

Take a look at the Product Manager and Tech Lead alliance, and get some tips on how to cultivate an effective partnership.

🔗 Read the article here • 3 min.

If you are considering moving into management roles, ask yourself these six questions first that will help you understand whether you’re ready for the role and if it’s the right fit for you and your career. 

1️⃣ Can I let go of my To-Do List?

The tech lead role is not about coding; it’s all about people. You have to know you have to let the code go and focus on new functions. You are not an individual contributor anymore. 

2️⃣ Am I good at listening?

Do you feel good listening to people’s problems? What about absorbing the context of words and the feelings behind them? Active listening involves paying full attention to what the other is saying and understanding their thoughts, ideas, and emotions.

3️⃣ Am I a great communicator?

You will spend most of your time in meetings and interacting with your teams, which means a huge portion of your job lays in the ability to communicate well.

It is all around! In your mentoring processes, 1:1s, delegation, meetings, when sharing a new project, or even resolving a conflict, among others.

4️⃣ Do you feel comfortable giving feedback?

One of the challenging missions of a manager is to develop the skill to give feedback, mainly because of the emotions and temperaments of people. Developing this skill can give you a head start in having an insightful conversation with your team members and evaluate how you can improve to drive the results you are working for. 

5️⃣ Do I like to take the initiative? Or do I wait for others’ approval?

A manager must know how to recognize good business opportunities and be willing to take risks to lead the team and the company on a good path. You will have to take the initiative in many opportunities, even if it means making difficult decisions.

These are just some questions you should ponder before jumping into a management position in tech. However, to help you dig deeper and discover if this is what you want to do, or if someone on your team is ready to take this leap, get some additional resources in the section below. 👇 

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📚 Roles and Career Resources

Learn about the different roles and careers you can develop in tech leadership: Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, CTO.

🔗 Get the resource here

🛠 Tech Leadership’s skills framework: A tool to grow in a balanced way.

Get an overview of the different roles and skills needed before jumping into a tech role. (Exercises included!)

🔗 Read the full article here • 4 min.

After disconnecting, relaxing, and enjoying holidays with your beloved ones, it’s time to get back to work! 

As expected, many of your team members may find it “difficult” to get the rhythm of work back. So, how do you help your team get back on track and make sure everyone is on the same page?  

Here you are 3 actionable tips that my team and I have put into practice to start 2022 off right.

👀 Start from looking back

Evaluate with your team everything they achieved and where they ended up in 2021, discuss what went well and where there is room for improvement.

At Lidr.co, we run a 4Ls retrospective exercise. It is a team activity upon completion of a sprint designed to understand what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved.

The 4Ls stand for liked, learned, lacked, and longed for. It empowers the team to highlight the positive elements of a sprint and understand the negative, allowing them to think from a factual rather than emotional perspective.  

It also helps open up the team to share their thoughts, bring out new ideas, and foster a sense of being heard as well as a sense of great accomplishment and motivation to do a great job again, which helps you bring your team to be on the same page again! 🙌 

🚩 Align your team and set expectations.

An aligned team aspires to achieve the same vision, understands the goals, and is made up of people who understand how to contribute their strengths. — Verne Harnish

When people are aligned to do what needs to be done, things can get done faster and easier.

Present a roadmap with the goals you want to achieve with your team, and set expectations at the individual level, starting by letting them know the why. It will provide them with clarity and direction. 

👥 Run a Town Hall meeting

This is an all-hands session! We at Lidr ran it to introduce the new year’s goals, big-picture updates, and strengthen our company culture.

It is the ideal time to present the roadmap that I talked about in the previous point, and discuss what your team members can do to help the company succeed.

These are all things that you should be doing regularly to keep your team engaged and aligned, but as we move into a new year, it’s always a great idea to look at these actionable tips with a fresh approach and renewed commitment.

Have a great new working year!

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⚒️ Template & Guide to 4L's Retrospectives

Get a free 4Ls Retrospective template to share the positives and negatives about your most recent sprint.

🔗 Get the template here • 3 min.

📄 Virtual Town Hall Meetings: 10 Tips to Run a Better Meeting

Interested in diving deep into Town hall meetings? This 7 min read, will give you clarity and a deep explanation about how to run these meetings and some tools to give you a boost!

🔗 Read the article here • 10 min.

📔 Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

This is a book I highly recommend because of its real-life examples and practical approach to Engineering Management. Read hilarious stories with serious lessons that Michael Lopp extracts from his varied and sometimes bizarre experiences as a manager at Apple, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, Syma…

🔗 Get the book here