The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 14. Gelling Your Engineering Leadership Team

One of the first leadership books I read was Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass), which introduces the concept of your peers being your “first team” rather than your direct reports. This was a powerful idea for me because it’s much harder to be a good teammate to your peers than to your direct reports. While your incentives are usually aligned with the team you manage, it’s very common for your incentives to be at odds with your peers’ incentives. The head of Marketing may want you to prioritize work that your team believes won’t be impactful, or the head of People may want you to be more selective in assigning top-performance designations even when you believe your team has earned them. Those are difficult topics to agree on.

Even if it’s easier to align with your direct reports than your peers, it is nonetheless surprisingly difficult to create an Engineering leadership team in which members are aligned with each other. Well-intentioned members will occasionally find themselves at odds with one another, and it’s your job as the Engineering executive to establish clear values for the team and to referee conduct that falls outside those values.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• Debugging the Engineering leadership team after stepping into a new role

• Gelling your leadership into an effective team

• What to expect from your direct reports in that leadership team

• Diagnosing conflict within your team