#165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For

Welcome to the Lemon Tech Leadership Podcast. My name is Alexander Leaminskam. I'm a former violinist turned management engineer, turned organizational psychologist, speaker and PCM leadership mentor and facilitator. In this space, everyone is invited to the table where we have real, eye opening conversations about tech leadership.

Two keywords utility and real life implementation. Knowledge tools, frameworks, ways of working, dos and don't. Taken from my personal experiences as a leader in the experiences of others is what you are going to get from every single episode. This is the Lemon Tech Leadership Podcast.

Okay, so let's go and take some action. Hi, everybody, am welcome to another episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. Today. I have the object that I I wanted to talk about for a long time now, and I talk about it quite often, so I'm not really even sure why it wasn't even an episode yet.

So let me start with this. You promoted your strongest engineer to the team meet or principal engineer. Six months later, they're frustrated. The team is frustrated, and somehow a person who was the most reliable individual the greatest I see that you ever had.

Now is your most complicated leadership problem. They're doing the old job heads down, executing and ignoring everything else the ner role requires. Or maybe this is a case you're that engineer, you got the title, you're working, you're working even harder than before, and you feel like everyone expects something from you, and that's no one actually defined before. You don't know if you're doing right.

You're not sure to whom to ask. So do you know somebody who had something like that? Or maybe you're the person. So this is about This is about the thing that I want to I wanted to talk the promoting best engineers to principal engineers to team leads two tech leads has a great idea, but I think we all know that's a lot of the time it is not.

It is not the happy ending partner. So I want to start with a question that's obvious, but I don't either hear a lot of people are talking about it. So the question is what nobody told them about the new job? So the job description lies.

This is a bold statement, I know, but here you have the principal engineer or tech let. Sounds like a more senior version of the priviest role if you ask me, But it isn't. It is a different role that requires a different set of skills, and the skills that made them exceptional before, for example, the speed, the precision, the independent death of work can actively work against them now and see unless on this one the communication protterns that work perfectly as an IC, high task focus, minimal relationship, overhead direct in tiers lend differently.

When you're a person, everyone looks for a cultural direction, psychological safety that feels efficient to them to stick to them things that they did, as I see, and what feels efficient to them feels cold or dismissive to others. And we also have an influenced problem here from what I see that at the singer I see level, the job is to convince people, convincing other engineers, why are given solutions to the right one, convincing stakeholders, while technical debt matters. Convincing your menager that a decision is to slow down.

That requires a completely different muscle, and most technically brilliant people were never asked to develop it before this moment. And there's also the contracting failure because in most promotions, the behavioral expectations, psychological level of the contract of the new role are never made and the engineer knows what's what kind of delivers have changed. They don't know what relational and cultural responsibilities change. And the gap is where the failure lives.

And actually this is very much a structural route. We promote people into a new role without contracting what the role actually is, so we can we can do something better about it. It can diagnose the transition better. So what type of is this engineer?

What base personality base they have? How does the type based type create specific friction and a new roal thinker based person who is deeply task oriented, who struggle with the ambiguity and the relational work of senior leadership if they don't have the bigger, higher access to the harmonizor floor or rebel floor. But on the other hand, based harmonizer may struggle with direct influence and the conflict navigation and the intervention of the leader looks totally different in each case.

Two. From the contracting perspective, the question is what was actually agreed when promotion happened. The answer is nothing explicit. Then the engineer is navigated by the neurole by interference.

Then interference at senior levels. Is that a good thing? So leaders need to have a great contracting conversation, a strong contracting conversation at the moment of promotion, with the question of what the success looks like in behavioral terms, not just the technical ones. And from the will of conflict perspective, the question is where is the current friction coming from.

If a recently promoted the engineer is struggling, is it a the conflict of data so maybe they don't know what the neural requires from them. Is the conflict of structure so that role maybe hasn't been defined well enough for anyone to succeed in it or make a comical values where they fundamentally don't believe that the relationship part of a job matter. And again each needs a different intervention. This is your job to find out what is that you can ask.

You don't need to figure out or assume, you can just have a conversation. And I think this is important as well. They have a conversation about it as the person. But the question is what is what the hypothesis looks like right now?

So from the practical perspective, what can we do as a summer we can have an we should have a new role contracting conversation. So before or immediately after a promotion to a senior I see or a lead role, you need to have a contracting conversation about what the new role requires beyond the technical delivery and use something very concrete. For example, in this role, success looks like being able to walk into a room of non technical stakeholders and get a buy in on a technical decision.

That's a skill we'll build together and it can be a starter of a conversation. The next one, this is the influence audit. So you should ask a the newly promoted engineer something like this, in the last month, what decisions did you influence that didn't make yourself that you did and make yourself? Who did you help think more clearly?

Or where did you shift someone's perspective? And then the answer to any of this question is I don't know or not many. That's the data. The role didn't land yet, so we need to we need to again recontract photo role means and think.

Number three that I'm thinking about is that the solution is to refrain what good work quote unquote looks like. And one of the most disorientating things that's that is about the ic to leader transition, is that the feedback loop disappears, the cold ships and the city results. Invisible is what invisible is, and slow is the influence on others, influences invisible and small. So the a you don't need to help this engineer to identify what they're leading.

Indicators of impact are not flagging metrics, but the early signals that the new jobs working. So this is what you can do. So if you recently promoted somebody or you are thinking about doing that, this week's challenge is one question for you. What is the psychological level of contract, relational behavioral contract for this role, not the technical one, the human one.

Write it down even if no one get it to you. You can define it for yourself. You can definitely do it for other people. So what does it mean to lead well at this level?

What would your team say it means? Because the promotion isn't the hard part. The job description nobody gave you. That's the hard part.

Exactly what this this episode is here to figure out. So this is what I just wanted to to say to you today that sometimes promoting the best engineer that you have to attain lead is not a best solution, but it can be the great the great decision with the proper contracting, with the proper mindset, skill set, tool set shift. That needs to be said out loud, not on the assumptions level, because if there's there's an assumption level and not a fact level and the contracting level, it is not going to be a success most of the time.

So go and check it out. If if you are in the situation you can, you can train on it then right away. If you are hearing those situations from other people, just share this episode with them because this is how they can learn how to go out of this situation or protect others from this that kind of situation, so to to be more effective, more efficient than the better of a leader at the end of the day, So thank you. This is it for today and I I want for you to have a better leadership life.

So this go and be the best manager of the best leader that's that that that you can for your people, and I'll see you soon.