How to manage developers better — LINE management

Colloquially software developers can be tough to manage. The standard personality traits that go along with a vocational, usually self-taught, discipline can clash with traditional Autocratic management styles resulting in friction and unhappiness within teams. This is of course a stereotyped view, however for software development teams to flourish we need to pivot away from strict management hierarchy and give individuals the space to grow and succeed.

LINE management is a concept I have utilised myself to allow development teams to succeed. As one of the principals I introduced this to said “Sometimes a concept needs a [pretty] acronym to make it believable”, so I make no apology for the term!

L — Lead

Leadership can mean a lot of different things to different people. The verb, to lead, means “to act as a guide; show the way”. Being a steersman for the ship does not necessarily mean being solely responsible for its direction, but you should have the ultimate say where you are going. Leadership also means embodying the values that your organisation holds critical. For me, the core values I focus on are:

• Be Bold: be prepared to take decisions and measured risks, however;
• Be Accountable: own the outcome, irrespective of success.

Being accountable for your team is a critical to their own ability to work independently and succeed. Owning the outcome means also taking responsibility of fixing things that don’t go to plan. When things go wrong there will be stakeholders who are looking to identify causes to avoid similar issues in future. A mistake is only a problem if it goes without rectification or learning. Part of being a leader means sometimes shielding the team from incoming criticism and not “passing the buck”. If your team feel protected by you they are more likely to work independently and be prepared to take decisions and be bold, particularly if they feel empowered which is discussed further on.

I — Inspire

Inspiring your team is critical to their success. The team need to believe in the combined vision of the business and the technical direction and it is your role as a manager to ensure this. If the team do not feel connected to the software they are developing, or indeed understand the problem they are trying to solve, then they are unlikely to want to grow and succeed within your organisation. A dictionary definition of inspiration is “an inspiring or animating action or influence”. It’s well accepted that creative professions such as music or art require inspiration for any form of quality work to be produced, but the same is true for creating new software.

Critical to inspiration is energy, without injecting energy and life into the team it is unlikely that they will feel inspired. Energy can be produced without physical animation or loud voices but with carefully selected engaging words. The key is to create energy within the team, not to present with energy. An inspiring quote does not lose its power by being written down, its power comes from a personal connection between the words and its reader.

To inspire the team you will need to effectively communicate the value of their work and the positive impact it will have on your business in a way that engages and focusses the team on exactly why they are working to achieve their goals. You should also highlight why the technical implementation that you are working on is best suited to the business — this does not mean you have to be on the most modern or the most common technology stack providing the software you produce meets business needs.

Without this inspiration staff won’t feel the same impetus on deadlines that your business will have. Particularly in a remote-first world, ensuring that all your staff have a clear reason to get up and go to work in the morning will increase productivity within the team and ensure a shared focus on the outcome for themselves, the team, and the business.

N — Nurture

“to support and encourage, as during the period of training or development”. This definition succinctly highlights the key areas we must focus on at an individual level for everyone in our team to feel like they can succeed.

Make time for people on the team, schedule regular one-to-ones, check-ins and perform team-wide health checks. The outcome here is to ensure that when someone needs support they should have established avenues to discuss without having to reach out. The inertia required for someone to reach out for help should be as low as possible.

A clear training plan and opportunity to develop will sustain a drive to succeed and grow, hopefully but not always to be retained within your organisation. Another core value I maintain within the team is to: ‘celebrate people leaving our organisation’. This value can only be successful if you have the focus on learning and development, if staff leave your organisation it should be because they have exhausted their growth with you and have found a new opportunity with another business. Celebrating the individual’s success rather than the loss for your team maintains this focus.

Without someone to nurture them staff will not know how to get support or what their future looks like within your organisation, increasing the likelihood that they will look for roles elsewhere. The impact of high staff turn over in software development is huge, as onboarding staff into existing software stacks and training them in business processes can take a significant time investment from others on the team, irrespective of how good your documentation is. For your team to be as efficient as possible you will want to minimise staff turnover.

E— Empower

Autonomous people-focussed teams is an aspect of the Agile Manifesto that a lot of teams seek out but can be hard to achieve. Empowerment is possibly the most important of the 4 principles here to allow the team to deliver independently and can be the biggest challenge for tech managers. Typically we became software developers because we like solving problems and designing solutions. Empowering the team means taking a step back and allowing them to architect the solution themselves, and your input only be to guide them towards it. This can be especially challenging when the team start to go down a different path than your intention. It’s important to ask questions rather than to propose answers whenever solutionising problems, and show the team your process if you disagree with their proposals.

The intended outcomes of successfully empowering your team is to give them the opportunity to learn the process of architecture and design of technical solutions, but also to ensure that they are bought-in to the intended solution. This is akin to the democratic management style which allows teams to work independently, but with yourself there to mitigate the potentially negative consequences of this way of working, such as inexperienced staff being unable to solve a problem alone or implementing the wrong solution to a problem.

Without empowerment you will likely end up with a much smaller cohort of people capable of designing solutions, which will increase your single point-of-failures and risk within the business. Also teams will be less efficient as they will need to be explained as to what the solution is and how to implement it. By empowering staff you end up with lower risk, faster implementation and staff who are growing and happy to be part of your team.

Conclusion

Through these four key pillars of management you will be able to build your team and their teams to be focussed on both their own and the business’ future, feel happy and look forward to working within your organisation, and ultimately consistently deliver value to your business.

Word definitions provided by Dictionary.com