Seagull Management
One of the favourite parts of my job that the pandemic took away was the chance to walk through team rooms at the end of the day and visit engineers on my team. Detractors of the practice would probably call this Seagull management. In his book, Leadership and the One Minute Manager , Ken Blanchard popularized the term in which he noted," Seagull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out." I would prefer to think of it as the software engineering equivalent of "walking the factory floor," but either way, I miss it.
As an architect, so much of your work has a long-time horizon. The impact of many of the critical decisions you make won't be realized for years after you make them. For example, the impact of deciding to use the OMA-DM protocol for the Windows RT management agent wasn't fully understood for four or five years after I made it. It is thrilling (and humbling) to be able to have such an impact in the long term – but in the short term it can leave you feeling unfulfilled at the end of the day.??
One of the joys of programming is that you can write a program, run it, and see the results. Get something wrong, and you know it right away. Get it correct, and you have instant gratification1. It is probably why we have an overabundance of developers with attention deficit disorder! Learning to let this go is one of the most challenging transitions for new tech leads . I compensate by setting aside time each cycle to code non-critical path components and experimental projects – and doing a bit of seagulling each day.??
For me, seagulling means keeping a half hour on my calendar at the end of the day and using it to stop by various team rooms to look, listen, and contribute2. Conversations can range from whiteboarding a design challenge that engineers are having, discussing the rationale behind why decisions were made, doing career check-ins, or just talking about what school you will enroll your kid in next year. These informal conversations give me a sense of how things are going in the organization – something I can't get from 1:1s, email, or group meetings.
I know the Internet likes to make fun of "magical hallway conversations ," – but I am a believer in them. Many L3s and L4s tend to feel intimidated and uncomfortable asking an L7 a question about challenges they are having or asking the reasons behind architectural decisions. But, when I walk by their desk and ask them how things are going, we can have these discussions. I can make slight course corrections in the moment (instead of having to do extensive resets at the end of the sprint). And I benefit greatly by understanding where I have failed to communicate correctly to the broader team.
Post pandemic, I have had to be much more intentional in how I interact with engineers on my team. Setting up many 1:1s, office hours, and organizing standing 'open agenda' meetings with the team to discuss any challenges. These worked (to an extent) and even had some advantages over seagulling (such as being more inclusive). As we enter into the new 'hybrid' normal, I am trying to find ways to blend this into my daily routine. But I am happy that I can get back to a little seagulling now and then.
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Be Happy!
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Footnotes:
Please note that the opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
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2 年At the end of my term as university student government president, a fresh reporter on the campus newspaper asked me whether I was happiest as president or as editor of the paper. I said then, and have even more reason to say now, that I got the greatest, satisfaction from the paper. It was immediate and real every Friday. I still have no idea what impact my input on residence design has had on those who live in it.
Senior Software Engineer at Prime Air
2 年I have been developing the habit of scheduling 15min "hallway" conversations to follow up on issues or just to meet new people after a virtual meeting. I describe the agenda as "a short hallway conversation we normally would have had" I try to make it the day of the meeting so people don't forget context of the earlier meeting. This is a structured way of keeping things informal and unstructured.
Ah, Seagulls (aka Gadflys!). My only warning to those being seagulls is to realize that those drive-bys can be destabilizing -- especially to less experienced teams. The natural tendency is to engage in a business or technical conversation and then "voila" - an opinion is rendered, it's taken as policy, and a team goes spiraling off in a different direction as they think they were just told by the Distinguished Engineer architect what they should do. Realize in those encounters that it's a short encounter, you probably shouldn't render an opinion/direction because you may not know enough in that fly-in to render an educated opinion, and even if you do know enough - you want to empower the teams to be the experts and reach a decision without your undue influence. If you do render an opinion, I had a GM that did a very good job of declaring, "this is my opinion - it is not a policy statement - and I'm willing to be wrong on this". Good technique.