Mentoring new tech leads
There is a crisis of leadership in technology. This isn’t surprising, engineers are trained to solve technical challenges with code, and then we dump them into leading teams with next to no training or support. Leadership is hard and a very different skill set to that of a senior engineer.
If we parented children like we promote engineers to tech lead, just after they have proven themselves capable of walking, we would push them into the deep end of a swimming pool.
In this post I describe how effective mentorship can smooth the transition from senior engineer to tech lead.
There is no royal road to technical leadership
Being a great technical lead doesn’t come down to one skill set and the journey can be overwhelming.
Mentorship should begin long before the formal promotion to tech lead. When an engineer has been ear marked for promotion into a tech lead role, the process should begin. Firstly because a successful mentoring relationship requires time to build trust and psychological safety that it needs to be effective, and secondly because there are many gaps in their skill set that need to be rounded out.
For example, a tech lead is responsible for the professional development of their team members. They will most likely have never coached and advised someone on how they can become the best version of themselves before. As a mentor, you can help them find babies first paddling pool where they can explore ideas and approaches, and where it is safe to fail. Maybe they can be encouraged to reach out to a local bootcamp and provide mentorship for one of the participants, or get involved in the company grad scheme, somewhere there are clear guide rails within in which they can’t do too much damage.
Being a great technical lead doesn’t come down to one skill set and the journey can be overwhelming.
Don’t forget to tell them why they are going to succeed and that they are in this position because they can be awesome. Remind them that they didn’t learn to code in 48 hours, and that they can learn leadership in 10 short years.
The mental shift
We engineers often tie our sense of identity to our ability to solve technical problems
The new tech lead can easily feel overwhelmed with their new responsibilities and different people respond differently to this feeling.
Some fall back to what they know and focus on the value they know they can deliver by cranking out code. Some will try to rise to the challenge without accepting that they just can’t be as hands on as they used to be, effectively now working two jobs and ultimately facing burnout. Others will realise they need to become hands off, but struggle to find the feeling of accomplishment and fulfilment they did in a more full time hands on role.
We engineers often tie our sense of identity to our ability to solve technical problems. It’s a lot easier to measure your contribution as a series of commits and features; it’s much harder to measure the intangible value you add as team glue. As a mentor we need to help the engineer shift their sense of self worth from the solutions they can create, to the people they can enable.
Mental shifts are not something that happen over night, the engineer is starting a long journey into an unknown world. As a mentor, you can explain the lie of the land, and provide a map and planned route to get them to where they need to be. Signpost the key landmarks along the route so they can mentally prepare for what is to come.
Teach an engineer to fish
Listen first, then show your workings as you guide them through the space of possibilities
People learn best from doing, gaining their own experience, not from being told the “right” answer. In leadership, there is almost never a right answer anyway.
Teach the engineer to reason through ideas and problems for themselves so that you don’t become a crutch.
Be a sounding board. When your mentee has a problem, don’t rush in with your opinion, listen, ask probing questions and help them come up with their own answer.
Once they have done the hard work, you can now start to bring in experiences in the form of stories of similar situations, or your own theories. It can be tempting to put forward your own approaches straight off the bat, but this can deprive them of valuable learning opportunities. Listen first, then show your workings as you guide them through the space of possibilities.
Failure should be embraced — as long as everyone gets out alive
People dont sit up at 3am mulling the events leading up to someone else’s failure
You shouldn’t protect your mentee from failure. Failure is the greatest teacher, and nobody learns lessons from other peoples stories in the visceral way they do from their own failure. People dont sit up at 3am mulling the events leading up to someone else’s failure.
Like children, we don’t want them to become as good as us, like they could if they knew everything we know. We are enabling them to become much more.
But, it is important that we don’t let our children play on the motorway. Listen to ideas your mentee has, and if you think it is too risky, explain why, and then work with them to create a sandbox experiment that they can do without betting the farm. This is a concept most senior engineers are well versed in and will happily lean into.
A newly minted tech lead will need to run as fast as they possibly can just to keep up with the responsibilities of their new role, but at some point they will hit a stride and be ready to start stretching out to big challenges. Bear this in mind and try to understand when you should be helping them survive and when they need to be pushed to thrive.
Be humble and share your network
Your mentee may stump you from time to time. Model healthy behaviours by being open and honest about this (be vulnerable). Take issues away and sleep on them, reach out to your network to ask others for their opinion and share back to your mentee. Put your mentee in touch with people who can help them. Sometimes, hearing the same lesson in another person’s voice can solidify the learning.
Open up about your own challenges, flip the table and let them be your sounding board. This not only builds trust, and offers your mentee a great learning opportunity to think about a broader set of problems, but also builds trust and strengthens your relationship. They might have a very valuable perspective on your problem.
What now?
If you are in the position of promoting a new tech lead, start a mentorship program
For me, moving to tech lead was hard. It was isolating and I made mistakes and blew them out of proportion in my mind. An experienced guide could have given me the right perspective enabling me to fix my view, take proper ownership of the problem and fix the situation. It took me many years to figure out what lessons I should be learning from my mistakes.
Because I wasn’t the best version of myself, a lot of value went un-captured. Nothing dramatic happened, but I was in a high leverage position where I could make a big impact on my team, and on the business. If I had a tour guide as I navigated this new wilderness, I may not have been mauled by so many bears or started so many forest fires.
If you are in the position of promoting a new tech lead, start a mentorship program. Maybe you can already get it going with the people you already have, maybe you need to hire someone who has been there and done it before, or maybe you need to look outside your org. Whatever you do, setting the new tech lead up for success is a smart business decision that benefits the person you promote, the team they will be leading, and the whole business.
If you are an engineer being promoted into the tech lead role, ask the company to support you in finding a mentor. Explain that you are excited about your new high impact role and that you want to make sure that you repay the trust being being placed in you. Most reasonable bosses will receive this well and do their best to help you. Also check out the LeadDev conference, which is filled with fantastic talks focussed on the many challenges you will face.