A Millennial's transition from IC to Leader

For the last 6 months, I went through a transition in responsibilities at work as I started work on a brand new product, to be built ground up, and asked to own the product architecture and lead a new engineering team. I saw myself move out of the individual contributor role to being entrusted the complete ownership of the engineering execution and success of this new product in Cisco CX.?

As a geriatric millennial, I immediately related to all the news 2021/22 articles about the millennial generation taking over leadership roles at the workforce, and I got a front row seat of this unfolding as I observed more of my peers, my college pals also go through this transition in their own careers.

This article aims to share my observations, learnings, style, principles and thought processes as I navigate through this role, which will hopefully allow my peers to reflect on their own experiences and others to get a perspective of the shifting dynamics within their teams.

Leading a Remote Team

From early 2020 till now, many new hires are working from home, and new leaders got a unique challenge to figure out the dynamics of getting a remote, multi-timezone team to work as one scrum team. I have not met my team, my team has not met each other, there are no team lunches, no water-cooler discussions, white-boarding sessions, walking over someone's desk to get a quick update, casual Fridays, none of that.

I was the traditional officer-goer before the pandemic, and I went through a phase of doubt, reinforcement, disconnected and scheduled a lot of 1:1s with my team in an attempt to keep in touch with my team, thinking that all of them is also going through the same.? It was a quiet realization over time that this was yet again a millennial feeling, and my team turned out to be very professional and self-driven and were just fine.

My Learnings .. so far

1. A team vision is important for a Team Leader. What is the team achieving in the next month, quarter and year? Such a vision provides meaning for the team's collective work. As sprints and releases go by, I constantly update and refine this picture, and socialize it with my team.

2. Have one weekly 1:1s with each member in the team, and one team meeting, that is different from the scrum meeting which is probably the only other time the whole team gets together and talks about their thoughts and experience in the team.

3. Create a group space for the engineers and leads in Slack/Webex helps to have a place for team to interact, get updates and discuss day to day work and non-work stuff.

4. As team leader, it is important to catch up on team discussions in the group space, and proactively keep updated of what the team is working on.? Jump in if team need to be unblocked, acknowledge if someone took initiative to help others, and appreciate teamwork when stories is completed. This lets the team know that leaders care, notice and will be there to guide and support the team as required.?

5. To encourage a self-driven work style, leaders enable and empower each member in the team. We do this by offering our trust by letting them make appropriate team decisions, and creating an accountable environment. Once that is established, leaders can step back, occasionally nudge the team, provide timely guidances, and let the team do their magic.

6. The other side to being a leader is to be self-aware and vulnerable with the team. That means it's ok to say 'I don't know' when there is a question for us; and then take an action to find out the answer and get back to the team.

7. Last but not least is to get the team's feedback at regular intervals. Facilitate this as a 360 feedback sent to the team, and keep it anonymous. Reviewing the collected feedback is a great input for a leader to grow in this role. It helps to understand what is going right, opportunities of improvements and general mood and sentiments of the team.

Leadership is a constant learning, and I continue to observe, adapt and grow in this role.

My Inspirations

Simon Sinek - The Infinite Mindset

Simon Sinek - Leadership explained