Norms for a leadership team

As organizations expand, engineering teams starts to grow apart. Silos start to show up. The management team (especially) starts drifting apart.
This quickly results in broken communication, lack of alignment, sub-optimal prioritization, turf wars and everything you imagine when you hear organizational politics.

Management team in this context is the group of managers and leaders within an organization.

Managers do not cause this drift (in most cases), but managers can absolutely work together to control this drift and ensure alignment. The best organizations I have witnessed are the ones where managers and leaders are aligned, motivated and share common principles and norms.

This write-up presents leadership norms I strongly believe keeps teams well connected and close-knit.

Mis-aligned silos

Optimize for the business

Management team’s success depends solely on the business outcome. Make the right local decisions to help the company with its broader priorities. When in doubt, optimize for what’s right for the business. Ask yourself — would you do this if this was your company?

• Nothing matters as much as delivering value to customers (internal or external).
• Balance short term and long term gains. Its hard, but that’s the job.
• Understand why you sell, what you sell, how you sell, who you sell. This will enable better decisions.
• Business impact can be delivered in many ways — revenue growth. cost savings, productivity gains, tech improvement, product foundation, operational excellence, quality improvements, etc.

People and trust first

People is the first P of the three P’s of management (People, Product/Tech, Process). Earn trust of your team, peers and others in the company. Invest time in building strong relationships across the company. Your strong relationships with your peers will reflect on your teams’ relationships with other teams.

• Help build people’s careers — invest time in mentoring, coaching and guiding.
• Provide constant, constructive feedback. Ask for feedback. Offer help to solve a problem other managers are facing.