by Elyse | Aug 28 | Leadership
Stepping into a new leadership role is exhilarating but comes with its fair share of challenges. Among the most critical is strengthening relationships as a new leader. Your ability to build trust with team members, stakeholders, and colleagues is essential for your success and the success of your organization. This article will delve into the importance of trust and provide practical tips on fostering it through effective communication, transparency, reliability, and other key strategies.
The Importance of Trust
Trust is the cornerstone of any successful relationship, and as a new leader, it’s crucial to establish trust early on. Building trust fosters a sense of safety and encourages open communication, collaboration, and accountability. When team members trust you, they’re more likely to share their ideas, concerns, and feedback, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving.
Furthermore, trust contributes to a positive organizational culture, reduces stress, and increases engagement and job satisfaction.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- 75 Journal Prompts for Career-Driven Women (blog post)
- 13 Causes of Overwhelm (blog post)
Practical Tips on Fostering Trust
Effective Communication
Open and transparent communication is critical to building trust. Make an effort to actively listen to your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues, and encourage them to share their thoughts and feelings.
Be clear about your expectations, goals, and any changes that may affect them.
Also, provide regular updates on progress and challenges, and be open to receiving feedback.
Transparency
Being transparent about your decisions, actions, and intentions is another essential element in strengthening relationships as a new leader.
Share the reasoning behind your choices, and be honest about your challenges. When you’re open and candid, others are more likely to trust you and reciprocate with transparency.
Reliability
Consistency in your actions and decisions is crucial for building trust.
Follow through on your commitments and be reliable in your interactions.
When you say you’ll do something, make sure to do it.
If you can’t, be upfront about it and explain why.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
Showing Empathy
Understanding and acknowledging the feelings and perspectives of others is essential for building trust.
Try to understand your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues’ challenges, and show empathy and support.
When others feel valued and understood, they’re more likely to trust you.
Acknowledging Mistakes
No one is perfect, and you’re bound to make mistakes as a new leader.
The key is acknowledging them, taking responsibility, and learning from them.
When you own up to your mistakes and genuinely try to correct them, others will appreciate your honesty and humility.
Other Tips for Strengthening Relationships As a New Leader
Building Rapport
Take the time to get to know your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues on a personal level.
Show interest in their lives outside work and find common ground to build rapport.
When others feel that you care about them as individuals, they’re more likely to trust you and feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and concerns.
Giving and Receiving Feedback
Regular feedback is essential for growth and improvement.
Make an effort to provide constructive feedback to your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues, and encourage them to do the same for you.
When you show that you value their input and are willing to make changes based on their feedback, you strengthen your relationships and build trust.
Being Approachable
As a leader, it’s crucial to be approachable and accessible.
Make an effort to be available for your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues, and create an environment where they feel comfortable reaching out to you with their questions, concerns, and ideas.
Conclusion
Strengthening relationships as a new leader is essential for your success and the success of your organization. Building trust through effective communication, transparency, reliability, and empathy can foster a positive organizational culture, improve performance, and establish solid and lasting relationships with your team members, stakeholders, and colleagues.
Remember, trust is a two-way street that takes time and effort to build. Be patient, be consistent, and most importantly, be genuine. Your efforts will pay off in the long run.
by Elyse | Jun 30 | Management
There are hundreds of books written on management and leadership. Management books have been written for decades. But, it is only in more recent years that there have been books for software engineering managers written.
While software engineering managers deal with the same challenges that managers in other fields do, they also deal with their unique challenges. Software engineering managers need to know the differences between managing, being a mentor, and being a tech lead.
They often need to liaison and communicate with non-technical people and explain complex, technical problems in simple terms. They need to solve and plan for complex technical issues and projects.
Being a software engineering manager is a niche field, and general management books often fail to address some problems you may face.
Top 3 Books for Software Engineering Managers
These books were written to fill the gap that general management books failed to fill.
Here are, the top 3 books for software engineering managers:
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
This book is the most “engineer-y” of these three books. The hardcover is a beautifully bound book that makes an excellent reference.
It is written by Will Larson, who has an impressive resume. The book is broken up into significant topic chapters and then smaller sections of each idea covered in that topic.
The book is written in a very digestible way and is easy to reference when you are looking for insight on a particular topic.
This book is the most technical on the list. It will help you develop a way of thinking about engineering in your organization and the management style that will suit highly-productive and intelligent engineers.
Resources:
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager: How to Be the Leader Your Development Team Needs
This thick reference book covers the management journey from when you first become a manager.
The way this book is written takes you through the emotional journey you will go on as you start your new role as a manager and through each struggle and new challenge you face.
It describes in detail why people expect certain things from an engineering manager and how non-technical people act when they are interested or nervous about one of your projects (and what to do about it!).
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager is like a bible for anyone who finds themselves managing a software engineering team and covers a wide breadth of topics.
It explains hiring, running one-on-ones, managing your time and calendar, workplace politics, performance reviews, productivity, and more. The book is a very well-rounded resource.
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
The Manager’s Path is written more like a novel than a reference book, although it still has plenty of good advice for software engineering managers.
The former CTO of Rent the Runway writes it. This book reads from the perspective of her reflecting on her time and her journey to becoming the CTO of a hyper-growth startup and the challenges that came from that position.
This book is the best book to read if you are most interested in how to set up your career to become a CTO or even just a software engineering manager.
It has many good tips for early career and how to best set yourself up for promotions or new opportunities. T
here is also a lot of helpful advice for how to get people to perform at their highest level and what the people you manage or mentor are looking for from you.
She also talks about how most people never really have a good manager, at least as a software engineer, and what you can do to change that and what you need to be a strong manager to your direct reports.
Other Management Books
Since it would be hard to keep this list to just these three, here are some other general management books that are great if you are looking for more resources:
A Final Note
While many general management books are written, few touch on the unique challenges and difficulties a software engineering manager faces. These are the top 3 books for software engineering managers that will give you guidance and direction for your role.
by Elyse | Jun 27 | Mindset
“Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.”
-Jim Rohn
Commitment to growing yourself is non-negotiable to becoming a successful and confident leader. Working on yourself can increase your confidence, skills, emotional intelligence, and empathy and make you a better leader. It can also increase your capacity to enjoy the successes that you accomplish and feel better.
Creating a personal development plan is essential so that you are clear about where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there.
How to Create a Personal Development Plan
In this post, we will walk through the steps to take and the questions to answer so that you can create a personal development plan customized to you.
Awareness
The first step in creating a personal development plan is to become aware of where you are now.
Getting to where you are going becomes much easier when you know where you are starting from.
Bringing awareness to where you are now can be a tremendous first step in improving areas of focus in your life.
It can help illuminate problems you didn’t know were there and explain why you do what you do.
To do this step, answer these questions:
- What are you thinking?
- What are the top 3 feelings you experience each day?
- What are your current struggles and challenges right now?
These questions will help you understand your current thinking and feeling habits. It will also be helpful to identify where you have pain points and what you want to change.
Resources:
The End Destination
Where do you want to go?
What do you want to achieve by creating a personal development plan?
This step is crucial because it gives direction, intention, and focus.
It also helps you prioritize and constrain your options and what you want to work on now.
Knowing where you want to go is important because you want to see the destination you are working towards.
Think carefully about what you want to achieve.
Most people aspire to specific goals because of how they imagine reaching them will make them feel.
But those feelings are available to you now. Once you learn to conjure those feelings up, you can experience the emotions at the end of your destination.
Questions to ask yourself about where you want to go:
- Where do you want to go? (What is your end destination?)
- How do you imagine you will feel once you get there?
- Why do you want to reach this particular goal?
- What is someone who has already achieved this goal thinking?
By answering these questions, you will have a clear destination and a start of a roadmap to how to create this goal in your life.
Plan to Get There
The next phase in creating your personal development plan is to plan how you will go from where you are now to where you want to go.
- Make a list of all the ways that you think you can accomplish moving from where you are to where you want to go
- Decide what ways you are going to commit to in your plan
- Write down each thing that may come up that may stop or hinder you on your way to reaching your goal
- Come up with solutions for each thing that may hinder you
- Put your plan into action
- Review and evaluate each week how your plan is going
- Adjust and refine your plan as necessary
These steps to create a personal development plan will help you focus on achieving the results you want to make.
A Final Note
You can use this process of creating a personal development plan each time you have a new goal or area of focus that you want to work on. It can be applied to learning new skills, habits, or a way of being. By creating a personal development plan, you ensure that you know where you are and where you are going and have thought through a plan about how to get there.
by Elyse | Jun 16 | Leadership, Mindset
Cultivating a growth mindset is a beneficial strategy for anyone looking to improve their career. Adopting a growth mindset can drive success and empowerment in your career.
A Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the idea that your mind is malleable and adaptable. It is the idea that you can stretch your mind, learn new things, and continually improve.
With a growth mindset, you would seek feedback, be resilient to failures, and not feel discouraged by others having success.
This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, defined as your mind is set in a particular state and unable to change it.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- 75 Journal Prompt Questions for Career-Driven Women (blog post)
- Is Leadership a Skill? (blog post)
Embracing Learning
Someone with a growth mindset is always learning and interested in continuous self-improvement.
This is an excellent skill for someone who wants to improve their career because someone with a growth mindset will seek out new opportunities, be open to learning new skills, and broaden their knowledge base.
You won’t feel hindered by an obstacle if you have a growth mindset.
If you don’t have a skillset, you will feel open and capable of learning it.
If you receive feedback, you will be open to learning from it instead of feeling stuck forever.
You will feel capable of learning leadership skills such as decision-making, communication, planning, confidence, emotional intelligence, and discipline.
Navigating Setbacks
Setbacks and failures are inevitable, especially when you are doing something new.
But with a growth mindset, you will use setbacks and failures to learn from instead of using them to stop you on your journey to your goal.
The setbacks and failures you experience can be some of the most valuable lessons you learn. If you had a fixed mindset, these setbacks would seem permanent and insurmountable.
With a growth mindset, you can analyze your failures, find a lesson to be learned from them and course-correct for the future so that it doesn’t happen again.
Creating a Supportive Environment
While having a growth mindset is something that you can adopt individually, it is also something that will benefit those who are around you as well because it creates a supportive environment.
Leaders with a growth mindset also encourage their team to have this mindset. This empowers their team to seek new opportunities, take risks, share ideas, and learn new skills.
A growth mindset on a team fosters collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, which leads to collective success.
A Final Note
Adopting a growth mindset can be a powerful tool when stepping into a leadership position. It can help you embrace learning opportunities, navigate setbacks skillfully and create a supportive environment for your team. This is how you can lead with resilience and empower yourself to unlock your full leadership potential.
by Elyse | Jun 2 | Leadership
Change management or leading change is arguably the most complex challenge you are up against when you are newly put into a leadership role. Leading change can quickly go awry if the proper change management processes are not implemented before any changes happen. In this blog post, we will go over what change management is, why it is important, and ways you can effectively lead change.
What is Change Management?
Change management is the process of managing the people side of change. It can be utilized any time that you want to make a significant change in your organization.
Change management considers the human side of change.
While you may think it is a great idea to start using new software at your organization, if you don’t correctly implement change management, you won’t get colleagues to use it.
A change management process brings awareness to why a change is needed, plans and prepares for the change, works to manage stakeholders and build alliances of of people who will help bring in the change and then evaluates, manages and reviews the success of the change.
Change management works to help people feel good about the change and adopt to the change.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- How to Deal With a Difficult Co-Worker (blog post)
- Management vs. Leadership (blog post)
Why Change Management is Important
A lot of statistics show that when organizations attempt to make significant changes without implementing a change management process, the success rate of the project plummets, it takes longer to get to adoption, and costs increase.
Humans typically don’t like change.
The brain is designed to keep you alive so that change can feel scary.
The brain knows that what you have done so far has worked to keep you alive, so it does not want to try anything new.
This is why most people are naturally resistant to change. It can feel scary, unknown, and uncertain.
Change management also helps people adapt to the change and troubleshoot any problems they may be having with a new change to ensure the success of the outcome.
When change management is done well, people feel prepared for the change and supported through the transition period.
The Change Management Process
There are many different popular change management processes. The main steps of most of the change management process are
- Awareness of the current situation
- Plan and prepare for the change
- Get support for the change
- Implement the change
- Support the change
- Evaluate the results
By taking these steps, you lessen people’s resistance to the change.
You also help support people through the transition to ease their frustrations during the learning curve.
By failing to implement a change management process, people will feel surprised and resistant to a change.
Managing Your Mind Through Leading Change
You might not agree with all the changes your organization decides to make.
You might need to make changes in your organization that other people vehemently disagree with.
Learning how to manage your mind around these changes will help you become a more effective leader and will help you feel empowered around what you can control, which is you!
Resources:
To help you manage your mind around leading changes ask yourself these questions:
- What do I think about this change?
- How does this change support the greater goals of the organization?
- What are the reasons someone would be opposed to this change?
- Why would someone support this change?
- How do I want to think, on purpose, about this change?
These questions can help you get clarity around why you feel opposed or supportive to changes in your organization and can also help you develop empathy towards what other people in the organization may be feeling about these changes as well.
Transitions
People go through multiple transitions throughout their career and transitions into new roles is cited as the most challenging time in someone’s career.
Opinions are typically formed very early on and once formed, it becomes hard to change. This is why transitions are such critical times in your career.
Transitions signal the start of something new, with equal potential to be amazing as disastrous.
Transitions are risky and you can be encountering multiple transitions at the same time like being promoted to a new role working for a new department at a new company in a new industry.
Being promoted to a new role, moving to a different function, starting at a new company and moving to a new industry are all examples of transitions.
In the book, The First 90 Days, the author goes over how to handle transitions in your career to help you be successful instead of falling into one of the all too common transition traps.
Since you making a transition in your career will be some form of change, this books dives into how to use a change management process to make the transition smooth and successful.
A Final Note
Leading change is one of the hardest things for someone who is new to leadership. Learning about change management process and preparing ahead of time can help new leaders feel more confident and lead change successfully at their organizations.
