It has been three days and still no reply from the QA manager. Your team has been tasked with getting the new quoting feature over the line, but you can't get an answer on how your team should go about testing. You've heard that there are automated tests in code bases, but it's not clear what the expectation is around implementing more. You're still new here. It's only been six weeks. You read the onboarding documents. You're still learning the culture and so far, it doesn't look good. The team is looking to you for answers and direction, but there isn't anyone to guide you. The CTO just left under mysterious circumstances. The former VP of engineering had stepped into the CTO role, and his replacement is being brought in quickly. Probably too quickly. No one above you has time to guide you. Other managers are anxious, so they are holding their cards close to their chest.
When you look around, you can see the great work the teams are doing. Collectively, the engineering team is continuing to deliver. However, even this early into your role, your team is opening up about the pains. The roadmap is unclear. Releases aren't given the ownership and resources they need. Features are delayed due to incorrect requirements identified late in development. Testing is being trimmed to try and keep to deadlines. You've been in this game a while, so it's nothing new. You know how to fix it. Or at least how to move in the right direction. Every time you try to nudge at it during engineering leadership meetings, it gets deflected or turned back on your lack of awareness of how things work here.
You've seen this pattern before, so you know where it leads when the burden keeps piling up on the team. No one internally seems to want to listen, or they are too scared to agree with the new guy given the organizational turmoil. So, you start talking to your network. You connect with an old colleague and vent. He's been in the trenches of engineering management with you. You can trust him and value his judgment. He listens and gives you advice about how to navigate the situation. It feels good to finally have someone to talk to and help you move forward.
He comes back to you a couple days later. He says he has been thinking about your pains and believes he has a solution. The solution is an assessment and a report. It's what he does for organizations going through these kinds of situations. He tells you how the report provides the insights that will help your team ship with more confidence. Something you can take to your leadership and show them another engineering expert sees it. You know it might just give you the leverage you need to show that you are both proactive and genuinely want to make things better. However, you hesitate. Your colleague even says he will do it for free with you. But you are worried about how it might come across given the leadership changes. Ultimately, you turn down a free solution that will give your team the insights it needs to be better.
This is a situation that engineering leaders find themselves in when joining new organizations. If you're an engineering manager, you probably have lived some version of this before. If you're up the chain from front-line managers, then you've likely been in this situation too. If not, you're lucky and joined a well-structured engineering organization. Not all of us are this lucky, and changes can happen at any time. So, it is important to understand why this plot is a widespread and recurring theme in engineering leadership.
It all comes down to culture around communication. When you join a new organization, you need to build trust. You gain or lose a lot of it through your communication, especially those first few touches with team members. You bring a fresh set of eyes. You will see things that everyone else takes for granted. However, in some cultures, people don't want to hear about more problems. Being a new leader can be a great advantage, but how much you can leverage it depends on the culture around communication.
Now, you can't change culture on day one. However, even a culture of poor communication can be overcome with good strategy and some perseverance. When communication is less than optimal, a good strategy is to start locally and work your way towards broader audiences.
Let's say you see a problem. A process is missing a key step that would alleviate a lot of delays. Start by simply talking to the people who run the process. Listen to them intently and take notes. Talk to each one privately first, as that puts people most at ease. After you've done a few, you can start communicating themes you are identifying and asking if they resonate with each person. Then talk to the stakeholders who are involved in the workflow. Execute the same strategy as you used for the individuals who run the process. Typically, by the end of this outreach, someone mentions the key step that you saw was missing. Many times it isn't that the missing ingredients go unnoticed. It is that no one wanted to take ownership of raising the fact they were missing and going to the store to get them. Next, you can start to share your findings with smaller groups, maybe your immediate team or direct reports. Replay what others said, of course keeping anonymity intact. If in your conversations someone else identified the problem, you've got credibility. You're adding your take to that of someone who has been living in that organization much longer than you.
As you gain traction, you can propose your solution. Always frame it as wanting feedback. It comes across that you care about solving the problem and about the impact it may have on the team and broader organization. Finally, you can work on sharing this across the engineering organization and beyond. At this point, you should have some local consensus about your vision for change and how it will affect the business. You can seek out key stakeholders and people of influence in the organization. It goes a long way when you propose a change to a system and even one senior individual is behind it. From there, the changes can be brought up in a larger forum, and you may be able to get more senior leaders to champion it for you.
You aren't powerless in an engineering organization that doesn't have good communication practices or where politics dominates. You just have to start small and show that you genuinely care. If you're an engineering leader, you also have much more freedom than you might think. You are there to lead through the challenges. If you have a strong belief that something you can control will make things better, take the risk and start delivering the version of it that you can.
Engineering culture can be slow to change, and some of the changes are insurmountable when you are new to an organization. Communication doesn't fix engineering culture overnight. But silence guarantees it never will.