This is what management needs to provide its teams. Give your teams ownership of their work, and both your customers and your employees will be grateful. The former for a great product, the latter for a great workplace.
4. Sounds good! How do I make it happen?
Servant leadership is key to this, but there is so much to it, I really can't get into the details here.
Senior management certainly has to be on board, but it's best if your entire engineering department is clear on why creating a career ladder for them is necessary.
Here are some key takeaways from the interview for leveling up engineers:
1. Pair programming is the most effective way to learn. If you want developers to grow quickly, pair them up with a more senior engineer, and it's guaranteed that both people will take away a lot.
2. As an engineering manager you can hand out stretch projects to your developers.
They get an interesting piece of work, and get to see if they want to grow their skills in that direction. You get to see if they show promise for another role.
It's a win-win.
How do you build an open feedback culture like GitHub?
0. Before anything else, you have to know, even if you’re at a small company, you can’t start it early enough. You need to set up a feedback system with a regular cycle.
1. Have everyone do self-reviews
Wherever you are, it can’t hurt to think about what you’ve been doing over the last months. A bit of self-reflection is a great first stage for your feedback system.
1. I use one on ones to give both positive and negative feedback. It's a frequent opportunity to do it. You want your direct reports to always know how they are perceived, rather than only learn about it at performance reviews.
2. You want to avoid giving critical feedback out of the blue. I tend to put a note about the broader topic of my critical feedback in the meeting agenda. It helps them to prepare.