Developing leadership skills: 3 things to know
If you’re a geek with leadership aspirations, this article is for you.
Geeks typically have personal strengths that are great for writing algorithms but less useful for developing the leadership skills that will enable them to manage teams and even organizations.
I personally believe that both “geeks” and “leaders” (broadly speaking) bring valuable ideas to the table. If you can be both, it will help your career immensely.
Without further ado, here are three things a geek must do to transform into a leader.
To develop leadership skills, you must learn to be comfortable with ambiguity
Many people in the technology industry are obsessed with details. And rightfully so. Intel Processors and Linux kernels are complicated things where the devil is in the details.
But someone at Intel has to put a stake in the ground say, “We’re going to design a faster processor next year.”
If a geek were in the room, he would say, “What do you mean by faster exactly? Higher frequency? More cores? An integrated memory controller?”
And if you provided an answer, then the geek might start talking about the details of how to build it. “OK. Higher frequency. Well, with some small architecture adjustments, we could…”
The leader is probably frustrated at this point. He wasn’t concerned with the details yet. He just wanted to talk about the merits of building a faster processor and he was comfortable with the ambiguity of that statement.
Don’t make people afraid to talk to you because they know you’ll insist on exploring every last detail of their idea. Sometimes ambiguity is OK, even required. If you’re going to be developing leadership skills, you need to be comfortable with that.
Think solutions first and implementation later
Customers aren’t interested in implementations, they’re interested in solutions.
Focus on the problems you can solve and the needs you can address, not the features you can build.
When a great idea is presented, many geeks (myself included) get caught in the trap of saying, “wait, how are we going to build that?”
Worry about the implementation later, once you’ve confirmed the merits of a particular idea.
If you work at it, you’ll realize there are many ways to provide value to a customer without necessarily building out a full-scale engineering implementation of an idea.
I once worked for someone who constantly challenged me to do just that. He needed to build demonstrations of different solutions quickly and without a lot of investment.
At the time, I was too focused on the implementation details.
He would say, “Can we put an RSS reader on that?” and I would respond, “Well, I will need a team of engineers, four months, and $200,000.”
To me, “RSS Reader” didn’t mean “a way for customers to see RSS feeds.” It meant “a bunch of lines of XML parsing code.”
My leader was rightfully interested in customer value, not implementation. So he would retort with, “Can we just integrate an existing RSS Reader with our product?”
Under his guidance, I would often quite literally create a brand new product at my desk just by thinking of creative ways to provide value without implementation.
Focus on emotional benefits
The final thing a geek must do to become a leader is to start thinking about emotional benefits.
Customers and colleagues may get excited about the merits of your idea, but they’ll get even more excited if you’re excited about it. You need to figure out how to convey the benefits to them in a visceral way.
I recommend reading Daniel Goleman’s book Primal Leadership, which reminds of us the power this approach:
“Even if they get everything else right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.”
The geek makes an intellectual case for his idea. The leader ties it to powerful emotions.
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