Uncover the leadership principles that drive success in remote teams, as shared by Jason Warner, CTO at Github. Delve into his insights and strategies, applicable not only to remote teams but to all, in our fifth installment of this series.
Don’t have relationships over there, start it
Have regular one-on-ones with your head of legal, head of infrastructure, or head of sales
What does the process of for hiring people in a fully remote process look like?
It’s not much different to what an in-person hiring process would look like.
The closing question for communication:
What’s your recommendation for choosing the right tool for the right scenario?
The way to scale
As companies are going to be scaling, not many people have seen it.
- They’re thinking that the techniques that worked over here work at 5,000 people, but they don’t. They just don’t… things break all the time.
- You have to learn to adapt.
Most organizations look more like a horizontal line
The CEO never gets feedback on certain things or contexts
- You need to get to the narrowest V possible
- Find out what that looks like and how to build that
- Most people don’t think about it as a framework or a system, they just basically wing it
What I had learned over the last couple of years is a couple of things:
My glutes… what happened is my hamstrings and my lower back, the glutes sit in between them… and my glutes stopped working appropriately.
- So, with all of those things compounded, I was having major lower back pain issues. But my back was never the issue.. It was a bunch of other things. Once I figured out what those were, I focused and directed on fixing those things
If there’s a 1B, it’s video just like this
everything else after that is a “super nice to have”
- If you can only choose 2, it is async communication and video
- Slack is not essential, but it is a nice complement to having both.
Jerry Li: And going back to all the pain points and challenges we talked about so far, I know you have a great analogy that incorporates all these elements into a very easy to relate to example.
Jason Warner shares an example of something very personal to him because over the last couple of years he’s developed a set of pains in his body.
Interesting cues to pay attention to
Jerry Li: Through this whole phone call, there’s been this image coming in my head of this… almost giant chessboard…
- I really wish we could have people sort of see how you’ve been physically representing the organization and how you’ve been helping guide the decisions.
- Jason Warner: It’s awesome!
Two other things to keep in mind:
Never reward bad behavior.
- If you continue to reward that bad behavior, you’re just going to have to entrench it, and that’s not a good place to be
- Observe and measure the healthiness of an organization by what they talk about.
How do you create smooth communication downwards, upwards, and lateral?
Ensure that lateral communication also happens in a healthy way
- Use the RACI model
- Directly responsible individual
- Agile with a capital A
- Smaller organizations should be using tech leads, senior engineers, managers to do a lot of this stuff until it becomes too overwhelming
- Surprise is a good marker of this
- Pay attention to subtle signs of bad communications
Have you read “The Subtle Art of Sabotage?”
Yes, it’s a book by Patrick Gallagher about how you can slow down the enemy in subtle ways.
The other is, when you timebox something, the natural reaction is for every engineering organization to say… “Can’t do this in that timeframe… Whatever this bit is, is too big to fit inside that box…”
In fact, you can’t have meaningful chunks broken down into small discrete units of time, which are one or two weeks.
- And that really tells me that we don’t fully understand the problem yet!
What have you done to set up the relationship with the canaries to just be really straight with you about feedback?
Anyone can be a canary. I think of it as people whose feedback I genuinely trust and value because over time they’ve proven that they have the perspective that you want.
- I’ve had people who I absolutely trust their judgment on a lot of things and I disagree with something that was going to be done for the organization and I told them that in one of our conversations I said, “Hey, I actually agree with you on this topic, although it’s not right for us right now.”
- We disagreed on the topic, but we were clear that we disagreed on it and it was pretty straightforward.
ProtoBus
Think of it as a ProtoBus – you send packages of information around the organization and you want them to be opened up and read
revisit decisions
You should be doing it intentionally
Jason Warner: Sure.
Communication pathways inside your organization that need to exist and the appropriate actions or responses that happen in each one of those levels
- For the most part, it can be distilled down into a couple of different things
- A.k.a. communication pathways within your organization and appropriate responses to those pathways
You’re talking about weeks and months before you’ve got that stuff tamped down.
You should have been investing in this stuff way before you needed it
- This is the type of stuff you need to invest in, and I can go into detail about what I think that looks like and what I’ve had success with
When do you actually need that last 9% to become great?
We’ve never tried it the other way. Maybe my percentages are that in-person is actually 95%, in videos its 94% and I’m using the wrong percentage differences.
- Whatever the case, it was almost irrelevant.
Bottom Line
You need to say something 4x-5x and you need to broadcast it. You don’t say something in Slack and then know the things.
- CEOs will change their mind or change an approach and assume that by saying it to somebody, one person, that THAT is a shift.
If you can get 90% of the 90% with video, you can optimize the last 9%
You largely only need it in certain contexts. You don’t need it everywhere.
- For example, in pandemic responses, you don’t even need it there because everyone had to go remote.
What does the role of in person interaction play in terms of creating engagement?
Video can play a role in that up to a point of 90%.
- There’s a 90% delta between what video can do and in person can do.
- You are never 100% going to have the context of someone you are communicating with 100% of the time. If you write it down and give it to someone, you will still not have all the context.
“Reopening of decisions made”
“We’ve made a decision, we’re going to go do this. The right people that communicate it to the right pathways have been done. Everyone’s on the same page… And then someone literally pops up from somewhere and says, “you know, I think we should revisit this decision. I just want to have the discussion again. I want to do that.” It’s not based on data. It’s more of wanting to have that discussion again, time to revisit it.”
You get the most viable decision if you’re looking for the fastest decision
Do two people in an interview with a candidate
- People are afraid of making a hiring mistake, so they’re trying to aggregate and diffuse that hiring decision to a group of people
- Have candidates do a real project and explain why they went down that path
- This will increase the fidelity of communication
When is the customer going to see this for the first time?
Project status is always a good one, which is… “All projects are green until one week before they’re due, and then they’re red.” That’s just the nature of the business.
- You’ve got to measure those things and have the feedback loops on them to be able to adjust accordingly.
What’s brought you the greatest joy as an engineering leader?
Seeing something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, NOW EXISTS because you were able to go do something.
- Mentoring people that you directly mentored and seeing them succeed is the most gratifying thing.
A good example of this is the original GitHub actions team at GitHub.
They put out a grand vision for what “GitHub Actions” was supposed to be in five years and then broke it down to what they wanted to see it get done in a two week sprint to show the world that GitHub was going to be something different.
- They got the team together and showed a working end-to-end demo.
Communication is so complex and the fidelity of it is so important, in that if you can use the higher fidelity forms, you’re able to better make it happen.
“Crisis” and “opportunity” are sort of represented with the same Chinese characters
- The aliens in Arrival would represent entire paragraphs just in a single visual construct
If you could only choose one tool, choose the one that becomes your institutional memory
GitHub is a quintessential institutional memory tool
- It has async communication happening in real time, and can even show comments
- If you don’t have GitHub, you’re in trouble
If you think about an organization, it has a large neural net.
You can train each node to make decisions that you would typically make, or better than you would, while you’re not in the room
- If you can do that, you have independent nodes, and you can actually have multiple games going on at the same time
Timebox everything
Everything should be timeboxed into one week sprints one week, two weeks, quarters, whatever. Figure out what those time boxes are.
- Make sure you are doing the things necessary to make sure it is successful, and that you are following through on them.
Jason Warner: My biggest fear is that I’ve got blind spots as a leader
As I progress in my career as I have more responsibility or as my teams grow, people are going to filter information to me
- My job is to make sure that the entire organization is achieving velocity, success, and outcomes
- It’s incredibly hard
Resources
Challenges with trust, communication, and engagement are NOT unique to remote teams.
- The differences between building trust in remote and co-located teams are different, and the role of in-person communication will diminish over time
- Two actions you can take immediately to improve hiring for your remote team
- Effective executive communication using the “V-shaped” pathway
- Examples of how to measure gaps in your communication feedback loops
- Signs of bad communication and how to overcome them
- How to train your organization to make better decisions when you’re not in the room
- Why you should prioritize tools for asynchronous communication and institutional memory
- Frameworks to think about team engagement
- Jason’s greatest joy as an engineering leader
Signs of mistrust
The easiest way to know there is mistrust is to hear things from others about others
- As a leader, acknowledge the organizational debt and try to redirect that over time
- You can’t stop the behavior right away, you have to re-direct it
Scaling leadership by applying the right tools and frameworks for effective communication
Jason Warner, Senior VP of Technology at GitHub, shares management principles fundamental to how he leads remote engineering teams.
- Every leader in an organization should make the decisions that only they can make and delegate all the other ones to others.
Find out the canaries in your organization
Are people that are great examples of who your organization should be on its best days
- Canaries should be in all levels of the organization, from engineers to managers
- Have a regular communication channel with these people to understand the health of your organization
How do you go about curating and building that out?
It all starts with you as a leader. You should be building these relationships with everyone in your organization or as many people as possible, from the beginning.
- You need to build up these relationships by watching, listening, absorbing, reflecting, and listening to how people communicate and hear how people talk about others.
A pre-investment before you need it
Get in shape over a period of time. If you got out of shape over the course of 20 years, you’re not going to get in shape, in a matter of weeks.
- If you’re not able to do that, make the necessary adjustments.
You need to create the best organization that you can and know that you are going to be taking some of that burden on for your organization, but your organization itself will be much better running and smooth.
In a remote setting, if you ever think that you’re having a miscommunication with somebody, jump to video right away!
Engagement
Have some standing check-ins
- Make sure everyone understands the goal
- Find a way that you are not getting into everyone’s business every single day or every hour or whatever, but you’ve got the right mechanism
- Cultivate a good culture and a good output
- A leader needs to cultivate both of those things
CEO
Every leader in an organization should make the decisions that ONLY they can make and delegate all the other ones
- Only the CEO can decide who is on the exec team and what the burn rate is going to be
- CEO makes those decisions and delegates down to the engineer in the organization
- From the bottom of the V all the way back up is again from the individual engineer marketer or a salesperson to the CEO
Video calls
Being expressive through your hands and facial expressions are important
- Practice in front of a mirror to observe yourself and make sure you’re representing your emotional state
- Make sure you don’t misinterpret someone else’s facial reaction as displeasure
- When you’re on a video call, close Slack while you’re doing it
If you are taking your over communicative approach, figure out how everybody in your organization can absorb that for their context
If you’re small enough, you try to never work through layers even though layers are important for the execution of things
- Broad blast it out and broadcast it out, do an all-company event, do some Q and A, and write it down
- Jump down a level and have the exact same conversation with as many people in an open forum across the organization as possible
Most organizations will be remote first because remote is better access to talent
Focus on the first 90% to reach your goal
- Once you’re there, get your optimizations
- If your goal is to become the world’s number one all-time bodybuilder, powerlifter, or Olympic athlete, then you’ll need to move into optimization range in extreme measures
