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Tech leadership is a mystery to many. As one racks up years of experience as a developer, there’s often an assumption that one must eventually move into tech leadership to continue to grow. And while this may be true, given the structure and hierarchy of the company you work for, the jump from individual contributor to tech leader isn’t always smooth. The two roles have some crossover in skills, but each also requires its own unique set of skills to get the job done as well.
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I have been a tech lead of sorts for a lot of my career, from my time managing an Infrastructure team to my side freelance projects, which often involve managing global infrastructure. But it’s only in the last two years that I’ve been at an Investment Bank, where I’ve been a tech lead in a more official capacity. With that shift came a lot of trial by fire, and I’ve definitely learned a lot along the way.
There are always ways to improve, and I most certainly don’t have all the answers.
Education is what remains after you have forgotten what you learned in school
/ Albert Einstein
It feels like the world of tech is full of new things, but that's not entirely true. There's not a lot of invention going on, but that's fine because it's innovation that powers growth and productivity and by deploying new technologies to raise productivity.
We need to look at two things invention and innovation.Invention is the creation of a new thing. Innovation is the doing of something with it.
Things have improved, certainly, got faster, cheaper, less energy intensive, but nothing really new. Any misunderstanding comes from not getting the importance of this, which is little to none. For what does matter is the innovation, the uses to which people put things. This is where markets shine simply because we get many more attempts at doing different things.
Any technological advance – invention if we wish – expands that technological universe of the possible. We then need some method of testing what might conceivably be done against what can be and what we want to be. Allowing every person on the planet a go at combination gives us the fastest sorting through of those possibilities. Thus we zero in on those which meet some need or desire more swiftly.
In the telephonic universe, this is how we ended up with SMS. Originally there for the testing engineers to be able to communicate, users loved it and so grew that industry.
Such serendipity is not unusual. The new big thing in banking for the poor was discovered similarly by accident. Think back a decade or two and it was all about microcredit. The poor needed access to credit, investment, so they could grow their own incomes. Sure, it worked, a bit. Then came M-Pesa, running really cheap banking over phones and the thought was this’ll really gee up that reduction of poverty through lending.
We also have mobile Money which offers Banking services cheaply and accessible to everyone.
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In large-scale transformations, the technical implementation is often far easier than the change management needed to make IT projects a success.
This is always down to the organisational culture in any company.
Organisational culture is the expression of combined daily behaviours that are constantly changing and interacting. Each behaviour is guided by a unique combination of values, mindsets and practices.
Leaders can directly influence how these three aspects affect behaviour and shape culture. They must also implement a tactical strategy to ensure that positive behaviours are identified, modelled, encouraged and ultimately rewarded.
Organisational values must align with an organisation’s goals, and should be reflected in leaders’ everyday decisions and behaviours. Lacking or unreliable leadership modelling of values can undermine workplace culture and even harm broader strategic objectives.
