Leadership Values
➝ Ask questions: Lead with empathy. Ask nonaccusatory questions and actively listen to conversations to learn the individual's conflict or impediment.
➝ Be Available: Have an open-door policy and put your team first
➝ Collaborate: Don't make decisions behind closed doors, including the team and their expertise before making decisions
➝ Be Transparent: Be open with communication and provide information as you receive it
➝ Frequent Feedback: Don't wait several weeks to provide feedback on a situation that occurred. Immediate and frequent feedback is how we all grow
➝ Positive Feedback: Ensuring team members know what they're doing well, not solely what they need to improve, allows them to understand their performance fully.
➝ Build Credibility: Learn the job you are asking your teams to do. Build technical skills and leverage the technical skills you already have. This ensures you can support them and builds trust with the team that you are qualified for the role
➝ Be Vulnerable: To ensure your team is comfortable coming to you, greet them with your own vulnerability. We are all human.
➝ Bias Towards Action: Don't just say you will do the work; complete the work. If the team is experiencing a pain point, address that pain point and remove the impediment.
➝ Coaching: Successful leaders are also successful coaches. We all want opportunities to learn and grow. Coach your direct reports consistently and foster a learning culture.
➝ Community: Build a community with your team where they all trust and rely on each other. The feeling of belonging helps everyone grow and remain happy while at work.
What is Leadership?
Many individuals view leadership as being the boss, making the decisions, and dictating your direct report's work daily. I view leadership differently. I am a successful leader if my team is prosperous, thriving, and happy. Leadership is building trust with direct reports and establishing a safe space and confidence with you when conflicts occur, when they feel they lack the skills to succeed, or when they need someone to talk to. It's utilizing empathy daily to understand what the people within your team are going through at work and home and helping them to grow through all of the ups and downs. To be successful leaders, we must mold ourselves to everyone who reports to us. Everyone needs a different type of leader; some need regular check-ins, while others need space. Some need 1-on-1 training time, some need peer training time, and some need asynchronous training time. Some learn through visual coaching, some through auditory coaching, and some through hands-on work. Strong leaders understand everyone is a human with an extraordinary life and individual needs and learn how to create success out of every situation. Leadership is success through others' success.
Leadership in Practice
➝ One-on-One with direct reports focusing on relationship building, impediments, career growth, general work happiness, and ongoing projects.
➝ Asynchronous communication through Slack with engineering managers, product managers, support, peers, design, and others I work with closely to connect on team progress, project progress, any help they need from the quality team, and more.
➝ Data Analysis around team performance, company defect performance, previous incident analysis, and process improvement statistics.
➝ Work on current OKRs, process improvements, ongoing project risks and quality assessments, upcoming project risks, and quality assessments.
➝ Planning team events and team-building exercises.
➝ Monthly quality engineering all hands to come together as a group and discuss changes, company initiatives, gather team feedback, and collaborate on the direction of quality.
➝ Quarterly anonymous feedback opportunities from the quality organization to reflect on process improvements, impediments, team happiness, leadership accountability, and career growth opportunities.