Leading Without a Map

How to Stay Steady When the Job Itself is Changing

No one can deny that our industry is in a period of great change. This industry never stops, and the rate goes up and down but change is a constant. Like it or not "change calls the tune we dance to."

One of the biggest reasons people resist change, even people who joined the software business to "change the world" is when they feel it threatens their self-perception and identity. In the west our job is often the primary piece of our identity. One sees it everywhere. Your LinkedIn profile has your name first, and some sort of job title or role description second. Heck even contestants on Jeopardy are introduced as "A marketing consultant from Eyebrow, Saskatchewan." When completing the sentence "I am a..." most people pick their job.

When change is high, that self-conception can quickly feel under threat. Even in the small it can happen. Your company decides they'd be better served writing new code in Java rather than Python or Ruby, you can expect a few "Pythonistas" or "Rubyists" to push back. In their heart of hearts they may agree with the decision on its merits but they nevertheless feel that their very identity is under threat. This can also include their social group/community/tribe membership, something that humans are genetically programmed to value and protect. So it's no doubt understandable that change can bring out strange and unpredictable behaviour in people when they feel like there's risk to their identity, self concept, or tribal membership.

What Can Leaders Do?

Well, first of all, acknowledge to ourselves that we are not immune from these phenomena either. Presumably most of us started out as software developers ourselves and when we started managing the people who did the job, it was the job we used to do so we got it. Over time, that's drifted. New frameworks and paradigms have emerged, new 'best' practices replaced the old 'best' practices and we became less intimately familiar with the day-to-day things our people were doing. This is uncomfortable at times, but we adapt. We learn what we can to stay involved at the right level and to coach and guide the people we're responsible for.

Now, the game is changing in a much more fundamental and profound way. And it's happening fast. I don't know what the job of software developer is going to look like in a year from now (or even 6 months for that matter) and, frankly, neither does anyone else. This makes the job of manager much much harder. Your people are used to you having at least some concept of a map and sharing it with them and you don't have one. Everyone's figuring it out together.

You Still Have to Lead

A good friend and former colleague once described an aspect of leadership as "smiling while the sky is falling." I'm not sure if he came up with it or if I should attribute it to someone else but I heard it from him first. My point here isn't that the sky is falling but rather, when your people are worried, you need to appear steadfast or you make the problem worse. You don't owe them certainty, because that would be dishonest and they'll clock your dishonesty whether they admit it or not. But just like in incident response, panic serves no one. You owe them calm reassurance that you're going to navigate this new world together and that you've got their best-interests at heart. You do this even though you might be feeling the same threat to your identity. You manage engineers but they're becoming some kind of new thing; bot-wranglers. Some of your other responsibilities are being offloaded to LLMs and everyone's role is going to keep changing until things inevitably settle down again (relatively speaking).

Let Your Values be the Map

With no playbook, we need some kind of framework for decision making. This is where we can fall back to 'first principles'. For me these are the things I hold important. Really, the basics:

• Doing my best to take care of the people.
• Doing what the business needs most at the given moment.
• Providing value to customers.

It sounds simple, and really, it is. Taking care of the people right now means recognizing that they're feeling that identity risk. The worst thing you can do is try to talk them out of it or convince them they're not feeling what they're feeling. Acknowledge that things are changing. Maintain 'esprit de corps' as best you can. Draw on your experience navigating big changes before. If you've been around this industry for any amount of time, you've been through some big paradigm shifts and come out the other side. Tell some stories, but don't make it all about you.

The business and customer angles come down to maintaining consistent principles around what software gets shipped to customers. I personally have the pleasing-to-nobody opinion that LLM coding tools are useful but not risk-free. Surely you have some skeptics in your midst who feel the same. Don't dismiss them either. Security, quality, maintainability, incident response, and the work-life balance of your people are still the responsibility of the humans running the company. That's the job right now, however the machinery of it changes.

Keep taking care of your people and customers, like you always have. You already know how.

Image:

"Statue of Captain George Vancouver, anchors and the Custom House, King's Lynn" by ell brown is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .