[bikingbismuth]

This is a hard reality I am learning right now.

At my previous company I had an amazing team that was very intrinsically motivated, they needed me to generally protect them from politics, participate in planning, and stay out of the way. They delivered wonderful results and saved our employer a lot of money. I would have considered myself “an engineer focused leader”.

New spot has challenged my identity a lot. I was expecting to come in and essentially do the same and it turned out the culture and people are almost completely different. My team needs a lot of performance management and cajoling to stay focused and deliver. For the first year I tried to be understanding, lead gently, and avoid awkward conversations, but I suspect my team was savvy to this and has weaponize my empathy a bit. I am now stuck in an awkward situation where I need essentially change who I am to the team and I don’t totally know how to do that gracefully.

This is 100% a problem of my own making. I am still figuring out how far I want to personally adopt a more “company focused vs person focused” mindset.

[xedrac]

I've worked as an IC on both highly productive teams, and completely stagnant teams. All of the productive teams were lightly managed, while the stagnant teams were very heavily managed. Some developers are just not ever going to be productive no matter what you do. However, many will respond well if they sense a positive trajectory - less stress, enough autonomy to tackle some tech debt or play with idea they have. Daily standups, sprint deadlines, etc... are counter productive IMO. They offer a sense of control to management, while simultaneously making your team less productive in the long run.

[bikingbismuth]

Thank you for the response. I really want to avoid formal stuff like sprints and stand ups if at all possible. As a former engineer, I agree that it burdens ICs needlessly and would take up a lot of my time to manage. I am struggling with finding the balance of accountability and autonomy and how to meaningfully track that.

[paulddraper]

Leopards don't change their spots.

If your team is not internally motivated, heaven help you.

[bikingbismuth]

My current team is a hulk assembled from a few previously broken teams. Essentially no one is doing the work they were hired for and there is fairly intense resistance from other areas of the business when we try to make change.

Lesson here is to be diligent about finding out why the team you will managing exists and a bit of how it came to be during the interview process.

Thanks for the response, it gave me a grim chuckle.