Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella is a book on Microsoft’s transformation journey ,corporate change and reinvention . While I am reading Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella , I am reminded how some of the key leadership principles shape our role as Engineering Leads.
Firstly its very significant being a empathetic leader , some of his quotes relevant to every leader
Empathy is at the core of a lot of great innovations in the world.
Be empathetic leader, learn when to let a person grow and when to intervene. Aim to bolster confidence of your team members.
Here is the summary of the leadership principles and my translation for engineering lead role
Slightly paraphrased, they are:
- Bring clarity in our team
- Generate energy within/across teams.
- Deliver success make things happen
1.Bring clarity
Firstly while leading big, complex initiatives ;we as leaders need to have a clarity to appreciate. Acknowledging the communication challenges, great engineering leader should:
- share consistent and compelling story about the problem(s), we are trying to solve and prioritise;
- toggle between vision and specifics while having clarity around strategic and tactical roadmap; and
- synthesising a message from internal and external noise
2. Generate energy
We as leaders need to inspire optimism, creativity, shared commitment and growth through times good and bad.
This is an outcome of the #1, if we do a good job of hashing out #1, this will fall in place, energies will get generated in the team first and than across
What this looks like is a engineering leader who can:
- be able to explain to people how their collaboration is essential in making a project work, treating them like partners, not dependencies; and
- tell the compelling story about their work to multiple audiences.
3.Deliver success
This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long term success and short term wins and being boundary less and globally minded in seeking solutions.
Many organisations define delivering success for Engineering Leaders as “shipping the roadmap with quality”— that’s a legitimate factor, but not everything. To me, this also means a engineering leader who can:
- don’t let the limitations of the past to dictate the contours of the future
- remove impediments — theirs and other peoples’; and
- define clear outcomes and metrics for their product and their deliverables ;
