Developing Technical Talent Development
TL:DR:
There is a weak spot in how we develop people; we reward building explicitly, and only implicitly (invisibly) value the ability to teach others how to succeed. We can ensure that people are rewarded for knowing how to develop the next generation of engineers by adding a criteria for promotion that a person must not just be able to deliver, but must also be able to teach others how to deliver. This approach ensures we always have the skills to continue to develop our teams.
Disclaimer: I work in information security and generally in tech. This proposal is purely scoped for those areas, since they are the ones I can speak to with reasonable authority. If this happens to be useful outside those spaces, I’d love to hear about it.
The Problem:
There is an interesting problem in every domain of expertise.
If you promote/invest in/teach and focus on the people who are defined as most promising, purely because they are successful at delivering projects, you risk leaving behind the generation after the ones you’ve promoted. I fully expect that statement to make some people bristle, but the simple fact is that just because someone has a talent for a topic, it doesn’t mean they have learned how to teach it or mentor it. This results in having mid or senior individual contributors who are great personally at building stuff, but have not been required to learn (and demonstrate) how to teach/mentor/enable the people around them.
A counter-argument I’ve heard is that at more senior levels, delivery expectations generally include delivery of large scale projects that can only be done by “working through other people”. However, “working through others” is about influencing/directing/coordinating. It’s not about teaching. We don’t explicitly have a way to measure people’s successful demonstration of their ability to teach the skills that they are being promoted for.
NOTE: For those outside of tech, the phrase “working through others” roughly means “influencing people to do what you need, and then coordinating that work”
The reality is that the concept of a “teaching window” is real. For those who aren’t familiar, this is a concept used often in martial arts: The teacher has to be able to remember what it was like being at their students’ level in order to be able to teach effectively, but also has to be far enough ahead of the student to actually be a useful teacher.
Often someone too senior ends up being responsible for people who are too junior, and they both fail because neither can ask or give what the other needs. A senior manager who has nothing more helpful to say than “you need to have more impact!!!” is not helpful to someone so junior that they don’t understand how to write an impact statement.
(Frankly “you need to have more impact!!” is not particularly helpful, especially when followed up with “I don’t know how to be more clear than that”.)
NOTE: Good front line managers are a treasure that is underrated. They are the people who are willing and able to pay attention to individuals on their team, and help them grow and develop with a level of focus (and patience!) that other leaders can’t or don’t have.
I was lucky enough to have a manager early in my career who literally sat down and walked me through what professional writing needed to look like, and another who rewrote my annual review more than once when I did a shit job of it. (BW & MS, thank you both for everything you did for me. I’d work for or with either of you again in a heartbeat.)
So the question is;
How do you make sure your mid-level people can help your junior people grow?
Or, put more simply; (with full credit to Lewis Carroll)
How do you make sure that the mid-level people you’ve promoted (and who now need to keep growing) have the opportunity to gain the experience required at teaching and mentoring so that they can continue your talent development lifecycle?
The Solution:
I was talking to a person who is much more junior, and coaching them on handling ambiguous projects and professional communication. I explained to them: “you should be able to expect the people above you to teach you these things. The fact that they can’t is a problem”. They observed that my statement implied that when they became more senior they would need to be able to also teach the things I was teaching them. That was a useful piece of insight for me that I hadn’t fully considered before. I realized that what we need in the tech industry is to follow the practice used (apocryphally) in medical school:
see one, do one, teach one
You can read more details about the concept and the validity of it here
NOTE: there is ongoing discussion on the validity of the concept in the medical community. I don’t think the concerns impact the usefulness for this situation but I’m open to being persuaded otherwise
The idea is that first you learn, then you practice, then you teach it to someone else. The combination of doing and teaching provides high confidence proof of actual understanding, since in order to teach a thing you must understand it better than is necessary simply to do it.
This seemed perfectly suited to addressing the tech industry problem, and I’ve started advocating it inside my company as a change in how we evaluate readiness for promotions.
How To Do It:
In practice this should really only add one new step for most people; the “teach one” step.
At present, most companies expect people to implicitly go through the process of “watching one” as part of learning, and the industry’s current focus is on people “doing one” in the sense of demonstrating their ability to deliver.
It is already common for people to be asked to help/teach/mentor, and (theoretically) to look for evidence of that during promotion. The gap is that this work isn’t required, and as a result it is an easy thing to ignore. Making the requirement explicit ensures that those who do this work get rewarded, and those who don’t do it still have to work equally hard to show their value in other ways. This approach also distinguishes between “delivering through others” (which may not actually include teaching), and explicitly “teaching one” (which requires the teacher to not be the person driving/delivering the project).
Implementing this would require three new activities:
- Communicate to the individual contributors the new expectation. (One hopes this goes without saying, but just in case.)
- Slightly change how you do project planning and tracking to ensure there are opportunities to “teach one” and that you can track it. This should be simple enough for any company that has any method of project planning and tracking of responsibility using something like DACI.
- During reviews and promotion discussions, include/discuss details not just about what someone has delivered on their own, but also what they have been the “teacher”/enabler for.
In a promotion document this could be represented as:
“I am working on a major project that demonstrates my readiness to move from Level 3 to Level 4. At the same time I am coaching a Level 2 person and supporting their work on their project that moves them to Level 3.”
Why You Shouldn’t do it:
As a strong believer in alternate analysis and red teaming in general, I always try to think about the reasons why my ideas are infeasible or flawed or likely to meet resistance. Here’s some possibilities:
- This may add some additional overhead to both project management and people management. If you have an organization that is struggling with either or both, (and people management in a pandemic/WFH world makes this even more likely), then this might be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back”. I honestly doubt it, and if your org isn’t growing your future leaders you’ve got bigger problems than this added complexity, but it is a consideration.
- People who are more introverted and/or who are still at the point in their career where they don’t think they should have to do anything except their technical work may object to this. Their objections are important to consider; if you aren’t good at mentoring/teaching and you are great at technology, this will add a new and possibly distasteful bar that one has to pass before being promoted. That said, I think this is a necessary bar, and that we do a disservice to the individuals and (obviously) to the organization if we let people be promoted without the full skillset required to be successful at higher levels.
- I’ve had some people assert that this sort of thing should be automatically captured because “we already require influencing and cross-org work”. First, I strongly assert that helping other people succeed is radically different from leveraging other people for personal success. Furthermore, conflating them is what got us into this situation. Second, that phrasing generally leads to essential work being made invisible, and according to industry research “invisible work” often becomes a burden for underrepresented groups.
In Summary:
Everyone thinks (sooner or later) about building the “next generation” of talent. You can build resilience against attrition into your org with minimal cost by thinking one step beyond that to the question of, “How do I make sure the next generation can build the one after that?”
Now, in the spirit of proper red teaming and the “10th person rule,” tell me why I’m wrong/what I’ve missed. :)
(republished with edits for clarity. Thank you to RH and BK)
