We're doing a special in-episode feature with our friends and sponsor Swarmia on engineering effectiveness. Is engineering a good investment? Is it helping the business move forward? What elements make a great software engineering organization and how can we get there from our current situation? Stay tuned for later in the episode, Otto Hilska, founder and CEO at Swarmia, breaks down tactics to enhance your strategic decision-making, unlock productivity, and drive better business outcomes.
You don't need to have this manager game face. I think there's this perception that when you're a manager, you're supposed to be the person who knows the answers to everything and you have to be super stoic and just get your job done and come in and execute. And while a part of the execution piece is... really necessary with being an effective manager. I think the other part is relationship building. Like you need to invest the time in understanding.
how people work because people will be more open and honest with you. It'll help out with retention or your team and overall like happiness. But if you don't and you make these wrong assumptions, it's not going to go well because you'll be treating people as resources and not humans. Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the engineering leadership community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC.
And I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits, and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Each of us have been gifted with or have developed certain superpowers.
If we can clearly identify those powers within ourselves and our teams, we can create greater self-awareness, deeper understanding, make more intentional management decisions and unlock far greater impact in our engineering organizations. And that's what we're after in this episode with Tia Caldwell.
We cover how to motivate your team and find their superpowers, different frameworks you can use to shift your team's mindset to better confront challenge and adversity, and the explicit conversations you should be having in your first one-on-ones to create greater psychological safety.
Let me introduce you to Tia. Over the past 15 years, she's led and managed engineering teams at Slack, Netflix, and Microsoft, covering a breadth of projects like Slack's monetization team, Xbox, Office 365, and streaming content and delivery. Tia serves as a facilitator for DevColor and is the co-founder of ColorCode, a scholarship fund dedicated to future leaders of color in tech. Enjoy our conversation with Tia Caldwell.
Tia, welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast. We're so excited to have you here and really looking forward to the conversation that we're going to get into. Thank you all so much for having me. Nice to see you again, Jerry and Patrick. Absolutely. Tia, you've spoken...
at our community's events several times over the last few years. And recently with the last ELC Summit, you were nominated for our community's Inspiring Leadership Award for your impact on your team and organization. And in the process of going through the nomination...
And what was so special about that experience for us was interviewing different nominators and getting a chance to interview your nominator, Pooja, who shared some really incredible stories about how you impacted her and her career. And in that conversation, there were really...
two qualities that she highlighted that stood out to us. The first was about your authenticity and leadership as the result of both a powerful blend of vulnerability and creating psychological safety. And the other being how you champion and motivate your teams. And so those are sort of the two elements that we're gonna be diving into today about authenticity and leadership and championing and motivating your teams.
The first place we wanted to dive into and start with is when you're working with your teams, how do you approach finding what motivates people? Yeah, I would say this is a tough skill that I've learned over time. I think when you're more junior in your career, you try to do this one size fits all. style of management and you realize that we're humans, we tend to focus on our weaknesses, but we have to contemplate how do we know what leadership traits come natural to us.
And how can that be utilized in a way to help our team excel? So one of the things that I really had a great time doing when I was at Slack was I used this framework called the superpower framework. And everybody loves learning about superpowers because it's all magical. And everybody's a fan of Marvel right now. But Psy Partners is a management consultant agency that analyzes leadership strengths between different characteristics of powerful leaders throughout the industry.
And what they did was they created a deck of cards and an app to help you and your team learn about your team's superpowers. And it's supposed to be something that is like innate to you as a person, not like who you want to be in the future. So how it works is you usually read a scenario card and you choose which one mostly resonates with you.
And then at the end, you flip it over and tell you about your leadership trait and also provide an aid to others on how to work with you, how it can be used for good or evil on a particular team. that sounds really powerful what was the experience like first going through those cards with your team tell us a little bit about what that experience was like
Yeah, actually, so I had set up a team on site. We were all in a group. And what happened was there was like 30 of us in a room. We brought in the learning and development specialists to come in and help facilitate the conversation as well, just to have a backup. But what was around the room was all of these different traits, but no one understood what it meant. So it had the trait and it had the good and evil definition posted on the wall.
And then each person came, sat down and had a deck of cards in front of them and didn't understand like what the heck these cards meant and you're not supposed to touch them. And how we got it set up was once we talked about like, why is leadership important to a team?
What do we all bring to the table? We went into the exercise of trying to figure out what was our innate leadership trait. And so that's kind of how we got it set up. What was your innate leadership trait or did it vary between the scenarios that you faced?
So the funny thing is the scenario cards, I took this training, I want to say three times. And during the three times, I got the same card twice. And I got a different card one time. I don't know, maybe it's depending on the day. It's actually a lot in the same family. My experience was this. So this is how it starts off. You flip the card over to understand your superpower. And the card that I got was this. The team is full of talent, but despite all the rock stars, they aren't making music.
They need to be more than the sum of their parts. They need someone who could bring out the best in each of them and the best in the team overall. And then the question that gets posed is why they need you. So I resonated with this card because this one, the category was harmonizer. So I am definitely a harmonizer. And that is kind of like my innate leadership trait.
where I can like see a lot of people working together, understand like what they bring to the table and then help them align and flow in a better way. The second one that I, this is the other car that I got the most was. The team is in the midst of a big push and they're not done yet. The work is getting closer, but it requires more effort, more attention, more elbow grease. They need to keep pushing. They need perseverance, which is why they need you.
So this card aligns to the grit trait and the superpower card. And so I kind of cycle between harmonizer and grit. Everything in how I approach life is usually like trying to figure out that perfect blend and how to give everything my all. And that's kind of like the two traits that align with me the most.
When you look back on some of your experiences as an engineering leader, are there a couple scenarios in your mind that stood out to you where harmonizing or grit were sort of at play? Like, do you have a, oh, yes, there it was at play. There was my superpower. Yeah, I think this comes into when you have to pick different projects. So previously, my team was working on a project that...
required us to migrate our system from one payment provider to another. And one of the things that I realized is that we had a lot of people we had just formed. I would say my team was a mix of like a couple senior folks. a lot of junior folks and how do you help get everyone kind of aligned and moving on the right track to let them know why this project is really important so the first thing i did was
set out some initial goals to say, here's what you want to do. Here's how we're going to define our like mini milestones in between. And let me tell you why it's important just to get everyone. on the same playing field. But then as we started working together a little bit more, you started seeing different traits come out from different people. Like you had the people who were super down in the weeds, wanted to understand every little thing.
versus the people who were more high level and wanted to understand more about, here's how this piece fits into this. Let's draw it out first. Let's take our time. So you kind of had that kind of juxtaposition at play. And my job as the harmonizer is to try to figure out how can we utilize this in the right stages to help prioritize what is important so that we're not just standing still and figuring out how the system works overall versus what can we immediately do now.
to kind of satisfy both spectrums of people. So that's one example. Is that something that came to you very naturally when you faced that situation? I would say that is definitely something to me that feels like it comes natural. I usually am always cycling through all of the one-on-one notes where people are saying, here's how I want to get to the next level, or here are things that I like to do, here are things that I don't like to do.
And that kind of plays a part into how I put people on certain projects while also trying to stretch them. Because even if they say like, hey, I'm not, I suck at this or I don't want to do this. you still have to give them a little bit of leeway. Or maybe they're not the main leader, but they can co-lead certain projects to help move the project along.
And that's a fun part of being a manager because you have doing all those bridge making or try to map everyone in different places within your map. Yeah, I 100% agree. So if you don't have another question, I could... tell you about the side of like, once I got my harmonizer card, how it kind of played into the good versus evil. Unless Patrick, you were going to say something. Please dive into that. That sounds awesome. All right. So.
Once you flip over the card, I know that I have the harmonizing card or the harmonizer card. And what I'm supposed to do is go around the room and find the one that aligns to this. And this will tell me about the good versus evil. So when you look at this. The harmonizer instinctively knows how to channel the team's energy and talent.
This is what it tells you. And with equal skill in communication and organization, harmonizers will try to make sense of everyone on the team to find a way for them to play to each other's strengths. With a harmonizer on the board, the team finds its rhythm. So this is just like the overall.
alignment piece, which I felt like was pretty natural for me. Now, the part that it also goes into is like, it helps me understand a little bit more about my superpower. So it says, if this is your superpower, you can usually get a professional performance out of an amateur team. but if your efforts are repeatedly stalling take another look at the composition of the team to see if there are important missing skills. Don't forget to consider growth opportunities.
to make sure that the team is optimized and don't fall flat and try to make the same person fill the same shoe over and over again. And it also gives you another section on the good versus people and like, here's how you can deal with them if you have to work with a person who is of that trait.
And I think the biggest thing there or the most insightful thing is try to be as open and honest and transparent as possible. Because when you are open and honest, that helps that person see the gears moving and helps them understand like how to get you aligned and in the right place.
The part that stands out to me a lot about harmonizing was you're talking about being able to get the right notes out of people or to identify some of the gaps in your team and make adjustments. Because I think what's so powerful about looking at... When you know your superpower, you can start to figure out how do you protect against the risks, but also maximize the strengths of that superpower. When you became aware of harmonizing being your superpower, how did that...
change or inform some of the decisions that you were making with your team? Like, is there an example of where you were able to, with awareness, be like, okay, my strength is harmonizing. Here's how I'm going to apply this to this situation with my team. Is there a moment where... you were able to do that? Yeah, I think this is the beauty of the whole project because not only did it allow for our team to have a framework since we all kind of are able to identify with our different traits.
but it allows you to understand like the positive aspects and how to bring that out in the team. And also like what you bring to that team in reverse. So I think this comes across, I would say. every quarter so how our team our company works is that every quarter we have products that we need to present in like an okr format our team roadmap for the quarter to say here are the set of products that we're going to do
Here's the people who are assigned to them. Here's the risk level and provide you with details on like if we feel like this project is going to be at risk because of resourcing. And I think the biggest thing is like, how do you try to align people? to those projects to make sure that they're working on the most impactful projects for their career.
I feel like I'm a broken record, but I feel like this happens all the time when you're a director or a manager because you have to always constantly be picking like the main person for this particular project or say you have an incident. Who's the person that you want to pull off to help out with this important incident that needs to get resolved right now? And so.
These scenarios come into play where you're like, okay, if it's an incident, I need a person with some grit. Let me figure out the people who have the most grit on the team and can come in and, you know, get their hands dirty and not be afraid to get deep on a particular issue.
And this is not an excuse to say, hey, I don't want to pull in people who don't have that characteristic, but I think it is an opportunity to partner and pair people who are like even opposites to help find the right balance. How do you think about how you put people onto different teams or projects that may on paper be quote unquote out of their ability, but really is it going to be a great opportunity for them to push and stretch themselves beyond their current capabilities?
Yeah, I think you kind of look at it as a collaboration and like the overall team dynamic or project dynamic. You look at the players of who's working in a certain situation. And what I do is I always try to partner or pair up people who are maybe a little bit more tenure with people who are more junior because it provides like a good role model example for them to see.
here's how this person is executing. And maybe I don't need to be a hundred percent coming up with all the ideas, but here's my like clear structured area for something that I can grow in. And so When I think about that, I think about people who are more senior in staff who need to exude leadership because that's a part of our career ladder anyway. When you become a more senior and advanced person, you're all about leadership.
But then as a junior person, letting them know, here's something I could aspire to. And not that you just get a free ride and you do what you're told. It's how can we make this the more... supportive environments that you are able to fail and learn at the same time. And that's kind of the framework I use when I apply people to different projects.
Do you reference the superpowers when you have, for example, conversations with your team members, doing one-on-one or doing other scenarios now that the team has a common language? How do you leverage that? Well, yeah, I think the funny part about all of this is that we were all going around yelling at our superpower. So another one was ingenuity or a gap detector. And there was all these different traits that people realized that they had, which were natural for them.
And we now in our one-on-ones or in a team meeting, we'll be like, oh, here comes the gap detector. Like it's just, it provides a funny language, but it helps people understand like, here's where I'm coming from. And it takes away a lot of the... stress and anxiety of someone feeling challenged or not pushed in the right direction when you realize this is just how I think. And it takes away a lot of that anxiety that you would get from a person who is making the wrong assumptions about you.
I see this come up all the time whenever we're in our group discussions where, say for instance, we're presenting architectural diagrams and that's like the perfect window for people to come in and ask lots of questions. This is a great place for a person who is a gap detector because they can come in and they can challenge other individuals thinking, you know, as long as it's respectful. So I'm there as a harmonizer, making sure that things are moving.
smoothly moving along people are able to get all of their questions out and concerns but then you want people to come in and not just go with the status quo you want people to push back and so You'll see that play out a lot throughout the team. This framework reminds me of when I first learned design patterns. It created a meta language.
So that the benefits of communication suddenly increase a lot because, you know, you have concrete concept to reference and everyone knows about it. So being able to have communication on that level, I can imagine how effective it can be. And also, it's fun. Looks like.
Do you have scenarios where you can play a different role, play a different superpower? Yeah, I think that's a great point. I cycle through this all the time. So my innate trait is harmonizer. But for example, my team is going through a really... large data migration of our financial system. It requires a lot of precision, teamwork, cross-group collaboration, and a lot of focus.
And the team right now has three engineers. At first, I started off with two engineers, and they were all about the grit. These engineers had nothing but grit. And when I would come in, I would ask them, OK, well, tell me how long is this project going to take?
They would first say super ambitiously, it'll take a month. It'll take a month. We'll get it done in a month. No worries. I'm like, okay, got it. Sounds a little strange. Then I start poking holes. So I turn into the gap detector where I'm like... Tell me why it takes a month. Can you help me understand how did you come up with this timeline? What are going to be the success metrics that we're going to hit? Or have you thought about how the deployment strategy is going to go for a certain thing?
And then that'll make them increase their time. And what we realized when we did that, when I was just having this conversation on... blind spots because they were so concerned about one particular part of the system being migrated properly. It didn't actually allow for them to see the bigger picture.
So I brought in a person on the project who could be a dedicated gap detector, who can come in and say, hey, you all, this looks like we're doing these 10 things and we're going super deep, but we're not making progress on X and Y. So how can we prioritize what are the most important things and agree about that up front so that we're always hitting the core milestones before going a little too deep and getting lost. So that kind of.
scenario played out a lot. And so I switched between all of them. But then the key thing is how can you make that person see and make them a little bit more aware? and add that person even though it creates a little bit of friction it's like the right amount of friction and tension to help the project land properly yeah that's very interesting
very valuable perspective for an engineer to have. Now, look at team composition, besides looking at their skill sets, but also their innate traits. I think this framework is also very useful for when you're doing hiring. At the end of this, the conclusion of this whole experiment, what we did was we realized what traits the team had in general, what our team brought to the table.
And there was key ones that we saw that were missing. So we realized that there were a lot of people who had harmonizing and grit and empathy. And that might be because one, our company. values empathy a lot so when we go through our hiring process we want to make sure that we're hiring folks who have empathy when we look at harmonizing
Maybe I'm hiring people that are like me. And so it's easier to bring somebody on who is similar in mindset. And what I really realized is that I needed people who were more the opposite. I wanted people who were more on the challenging side. We had a lot of people who, not saying they didn't take initiative.
But it was like, if I say this is what we're going to do, they would do it without like kind of pushing back and having that challenging mentality. So giving people the ability to lead autonomously and then feel like they have the support to question my thoughts and views is kind of.
I would say the holy grail when we finally realized what we unlocked. We used that as a supplement for hiring, not saying that was the only thing that we looked for, but we were trying to figure out, hey, when we look for people, are they asking the right sort of questions? Are they pushing back and all that stuff? Could I help?
helped us like find the right teammate. That's awesome, Tia. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. To extend the superhero metaphor a little bit, I think all superheroes face conflict or challenges and that's oftentimes what makes them a superhero.
In addition to helping your team identify their own superpowers, what else are you looking out for as a leader? Yeah, so I was actually introduced to this really cool framework called the Drama Triangle through... my career coach i was in a career coaching session with three other people and it was a career coach from the conscious leadership group and they have way more details about it in the book called 15 commitments to conscious leadership
And as part of our goals there, it was trying to figure out when a situation comes up with a lot of drama or you're facing conflict. how do you operate above the line? And what that means by above the line is like, how do you not let the drama interfere with your actual work? And you come from a positive place and how you approach issues.
or drama that comes to your team and sometimes this can be caused by you or this can be caused by others but your response into how you deal with the drama is really critical for modeling the right behavior for your team so
Despite all the focus that we've had on superpowers and finding your strengths, you also need to figure out when something, a problem, or an issue does arise, how can you recognize those traits to diffuse the situation in the right way? The next question I wanted to ask would be...
Can you help us understand like what are some of the default modes that people fall into? Yeah. And how can people become more aware of them? Yeah. So in the drama triangle, which was created by Stephen Cartman in the 1960s, it has three. uh different size to this so the first person that you will see and this is the one that resonates with me the most is the hero or the rescuer
and that person takes responsibility for other people's problems and makes it their own, you'll typically see questions come in like, if that person did what I said, they'd be happy. Or, oh, look at that poor soul. I'm nice. I'll help them. And so I... 100% by default go into this mode in my personal life and professional life. But once I explain the other two, you'll see how this is a bad triangle to just be around in general.
The next one is the villain or the persecutor. And this person usually comes in and they'll say, that person will get what's coming to them or I'm right, they're wrong. They just need to do what I say. And this person can feel super frustrated and self-righteous, but they must win at all costs. We've all had somebody that we've dealt with like that. And then the third part of the triangle is the victim.
The victim feels hopeless and powerless. They'll usually feel like, this always happens to me, or why can't I just get a break? And it allows for that victim mentality to play out. when drama like comes knocking at your front door. So the huge epiphany that I had with this framework was that I realized that I allow people to come into my life and play the victim. all the time somebody will come in and tell me a sad story and me being the people pleaser
will immediately go into fix it mode. Like, how can I fix this for you? Or, hey, you're having an issue. Let's talk about it. And then I will go take on that issue as if it was my full-time job. And I thought this was like a good trait because you want to make sure that you know.
You're keeping your friends happy. You're keeping people happy. You feel like you're solving problems, but you don't realize at the end that you're causing a huge drain of energy to yourself and you're kind of perpetuating the problem. You're not allowing that person to. identify like the issue or a solution on your own versus you coming in immediately with a solution. And then they come back to you a week later saying like, here's a new problem and now you have to go solve it.
This is just something that was a huge epiphany for me. I had the conversation. I showed this drama triangle to my mom and my sister, and they all agreed. They were like, yes, you played this role, but then they also acknowledged that they played. the victim or the villain in certain cases, and they know how to either get me to come to Sacramento or get some money out of me just because of the way that I typically just baby my friends and family.
For me, I'm looking at the victim, hero, and villain, and I'm thinking about, man, I definitely identify with different ones at different times. Is that common for people to play a hero in one scenario or play the victim in another? It is definitely common. And it also just depends on the power dynamic. I think when you are with a close friend or you are with a family member.
They know how to take advantage of you, so to speak. I know that sounds terrible, but it is true where you can say like, hey, I'm in victim mode. But then when you talk to somebody who is a little bit more higher up or has more authority. you turn into this victim mode because you want to look like this person who needs a lot of help. And so we do this all the time. It just depends on the person. Yeah. Well, the family example you shared really resonates.
I definitely play the hero when it comes to my family and taking responsibility for their problems. But then I'm also looking at like some of the conversations Jerry and I have and I'm like, well, I play victim real hard where I'm like a hopeless, powerless, especially when it comes to like time management or project management or like, oh, we have this deadline to meet.
And I'm like, oh man, I'm never going to be able to get any of this done. I feel so hopeless. So that's really interesting to see all of that at play. Jerry, which ones do you resonate with? I think I played... all the roles at different times. And after hearing what Tia just shared, it just came to me that a better sense of awareness. There are things I should have avoided. or ways that can probably be more valuable in terms of not solving a problem, but
probably better to help them to solve problems for themselves. So not realizing that in the past, I think it's a base of a lot of opportunities for personal girls for myself and also the team members. We're taking a quick break for a special feature deconstructing the topic of engineering effectiveness with our friends and sponsor Swarmia. Otto Hilska, founder and CEO at Swarmia, discusses how to drive.
better business outcomes, breaking down how tracking your engineering investment balance and time spent enhances strategic decision-making and unlocks productivity in your engineering organization. The one way to improve business outcomes would be to track investment balance of your teams. So how much are we spending on building new things versus keeping the lights on? And the conversation you should be having is what kind of reactive work is affecting our
ability to focus on the more important things. What are the root causes and how can we fix that? So you can segment and analyze your engineering work in multiple ways. One of the ways I like to do it is based on this balance framework that a former VP of engineering at Dropbox introduced. And the idea is to look at how much are you spending on
new things, which is what everyone expects from engineering? How much are you spending on improving existing things, which is a function of all the features that you built? You're going to still have to maintain them later. Then you have improving your own team's productivity. which is things like refactorings and those technical improvements and finally
there's the mandatory category of keeping the lights on, because if production environment goes down, we're going to go and fix it no matter what the feature priority was. When you look at these categories, you can see teams where keeping the lights on and subtake... And what you have to play with at that point is the 20% of your capacity, and that's likely going to...
to keeping the business stakeholders happy and building a couple of features. But it's going to take the team forever to get out of that situation. So what the team can do, oftentimes this is a call for staffing. So if the team scope is too big... then they just need more people to realistically get out of it. They also need peace of mind to invest in the right things. So if there are things that need to be fixed and the root causes of those issues, then...
They just can't ship that many product features right now. maybe you can move some of the responsibilities to another team etc but these are the types of discussions that you should be having and in reality most organizations are just saying that well this team is not shipping anymore we're not getting the features that we wanted so leveling the discussion from that.
to looking at the different segments and how do we invest in these teams and how much headcount does any team need. That's a huge improvement and it allows the developers to get their voices heard as well because most likely they have an idea what that improvement project under that improving productivity.
be when you're able to focus on the right things first of all it's a huge motivation boost for the developers because everyone loves seeing their own software being used by someone else who is actually getting value from it If you get from investing 10% of your time on the right things to 40%, that's a 4x improvement in the team's ability to ship valuable things. And that's perfectly achievable. And we've seen that in multiple organizations.
takes in data from all the development tools, including Jira, Linear, GitHub, etc., combines it with survey data from your developers, introduces a bunch of feedback loops where developers see how did they just do with the feature that they shipped.
Well, in case of business outcomes, we give you a view of your whole organization's time spent on different categories of work like new things versus keeping the lights on. We give you an idea of how much money we're actually spending on these things.
So what does it cost for us to deliver this big UI redesign that goes across all of the different teams, for example, that allows you to have a better quality conversation about what is the ROI on this initiative. And all of that happens automatically.
Swarmia helps everyone in your software organization, from the CTO to each engineer, systematically eliminate bottlenecks that slow you down. If you want to learn how Swarmia can drive better business outcomes, improve developer productivity, and enhance your... That's Swarmia.com forward slash ELC.
Tia, in a second, I know we'll talk about how to reverse the drama cycle, so to speak, but along the lines of awareness and how this helps increase awareness, do you have any questions you ask yourself or ways that you help yourself become more aware of? maybe what role you're playing within the drama cycle? Is there a way that helps you stay aware of the different moments or practices that you employ for that?
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is active listening. When somebody comes to me with a problem, I let them first say like... here's what they're going to talk about. And I'll ask explicitly, do you want my opinion on X? Or is this just event session? And so what will typically happen with my friends is they'll say like, hey, this conversation is just going to be event session. We don't have to solve anything. And that's great.
And I think I now have the framework to know, like when they're in venting mode, is that something that I need to just sit there and listen? Or is it something where they want to brainstorm a solution? And if they are brainstorming a solution, if they do want a solution to say they did answer and say like, oh, I need some help with this.
putting the ball in their court and actually understanding from this drama triangle, how would they go about solving it versus me offering my opinion first? And I think this plays out a lot when you're a manager, because when you provide your opinion, your opinion kind of...
carries a little bit more weight when you're talking to your team. And so having the team and how I approach just like meetings, one-on-ones, I'll ask them for their opinion first before I give mine. I'll typically reserve mine for the end.
just to make sure that we can play off of the, they're coming up with solutions versus me being the first person to come up with it. Is there an example of where, when you asked the team member you were working with to... come up with a solution that changed the result or came up with a different idea that made a big impact.
Yeah. So one of the examples I will say is that first you have to make sure that you shift your mindset to be more outcome-based versus the personal piece. So you have to figure out how, when a person is explaining to you a problem. how to remove the personal piece to become more outcome-based. And one of the problems or products that I usually hear a lot, which is like annoying, but it happens all the time, is Person X. Let's call Person X Jane. Jane always gets to work on the cool projects.
And is it because she's your favorite? Is it because she's the most senior? And you have to recognize that... This typically happens a lot when it's coming to performance season. You'll see people who want to work on the shiny project and then they instantly get jealous because they feel like this person's project is going really well and they want to be a part of that success. And so... me being in hero mode all the time, my response would typically be something like,
Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Let's see if Jane can use an extra pair of hands or something just to make sure that that person stays happy or whatnot. And I'm not thinking about what message is sending to the team.
How it's going to impact the current project that that person is on? And will it be a setback for the project that they're currently on? And so this kind of scenario typically happens a lot during performance season. And so you want people, you had this guilt trip where you're like, okay, well, I want them to get promoted. Is that the right thing to try to push them on? And so I had to figure out how to shift my mindset from being the hero to a coach.
where I started approaching things to be a little bit more, I would say I would inquire more about like, why is that project so important? Or like, why is that project interesting to you? So instead of saying like, oh, let me take you off that project and see if Jane needs an extra pair of hands and I go talk to Jane. and we figure out how to get this person on the project, what I would typically do is say, what is it about Jane's project that excites you?
Could you explore something similar in this area, in your current area? Do you want to brainstorm some ideas on how to pitch some, you know, projects in this particular area if that's your true interest? And so... When it comes to like the next quarter, when we do project planning, you'll have your pitches ready and we can have that conversation. But putting the ball in their court versus like me doing all the work.
It's kind of the big shift that I had to do. And there's a great framework for this. So I know I talked to you about the drama triangle, but the framework is called the empowerment dynamic, where you empower others to find positive alternatives. to shifting how they can get like the most out of themselves to avoid the drama triangle. Can you give us the breakdown of what the empowerment triangle is? The switch you shared.
just created such a powerful psychological shift in terms of the questions you were asking that person and really changes the whole conversation. So give us the breakdown. What's the empowerment triangle? So the empowerment triangle, I'll talk about the hero first, because that's my default trait. The hero, as I explained before, usually intervenes on behalf of the victim, tries to save everyone and takes the world on their shoulders.
But the goal to flipping that into something positive is to empower people through inquiry to help them gain clarity. So that's where you really want to go into coaching mode where you ask a series of questions. You put the ball in their court versus like you try to take on everything at once.
Now, the victim is a person who we talked about earlier is they like to pretend, or maybe they are pretending, I don't know, but they are typically the people who resonate with being powerless because of a certain circumstance. You want to change them from being a victim and into a creator.
And a creator focuses on the vision and desired outcomes. They take full responsibility for initiating the action to achieve the desired outcome. So once you realize somebody's in victim mode or like they're venting, how to get them to shift their focus into creation. usually drives the conversation in the right direction. Now, the final person I left out was the villain.
where they must win at all costs. You know, they control everything and others through blame and criticism. You want to actually have them flip to being a challenger. You want them to spark learning by challenging assumptions and the status quo. focuses on the improvement and development by holding people accountable for taking action. So that's kind of the reverse of the triangle in a more positive light to help you get from that low place to like the higher side.
I'm going to ask this question on behalf of Jerry because I'm sure based on what we shared about beforehand, he would love for me to shift from the victim to the creator. So how do you help somebody make that shift to go from victim to creator? Patrick, you're a mind reader. This may be the million-dollar question, I think, for everybody. But I think what I just really admired, Tia, was the way that you changed your questions to go from...
hero to coach totally changed that conversation. And so I'm looking for the secret recipe to figure out how can you shift victim to creator to be more empowering. Yeah, I think the first thing is like what a victim you have to one make sure that they feel comfortable and then actually showing them the drama triangle is a great first step so one everybody on my team actually had a copy of this drama triangle that i explained to you today so we all know the role that we have to play
and then when they do come to me with a situation where they're like oh you know this is always happening or blaming everybody else i'll say let's stop for a second put a pause in this conversation because i feel like you're playing the victim how can we actually shift you into creation mode because you should be responsible for coming up with the vision. How would you go about solving that particular problem if you were in that situation?
removing all of the other circumstances on the outside and that kind of you know startles them for a bit but i think once they have this framework in place and they know that i'm coming from a good place of like Great. Now we have this, we put this on the table. How do we get to the next thing? And I think that will obviously over time help them just shift from victim to creator mode.
Well, I think, you know, I resonate with that because I think we so often as human beings get so wrapped up in our own stuff and our own stories. And the ability to sort of depersonalize away from your issue helps create that freedom in space.
to then i guess as the creator does create yes because i'm thinking and like there's some other practices of like how would that other person solve that problem who has maybe aspirational characteristics or qualities that you want to better embody being a really powerful tool to do that so how do you change the villain to the the challenger i would love to transform my villains into challengers that would be great that one takes some work because
they are a little bit prickly. And if you looked at the triangle, they are the opposite of my innate trait too, which is being the hero. So there will be a tension between the two just because. hero and villain who wants to be in that group to try to figure that out. But I think the biggest thing is like letting them know that what you're saying adds value if you reframe it a different way. And so I think once you have them realize like this would be supportive or this would be helpful.
for the team to know, but if you ask it in a different way, it will help resonate with your team more. And once you realize that, that kind of pulls at the heartstrings and helps them kind of reverse their actions into being. less of a like hey everyone is bad or not as smart as me and to like okay well this person
This is another scenario. I'll have a person who will say in the villain state, I don't want to work with this person. They're too junior. They're just going to slow me down on a project. I really just do it all by myself. And that could be a person who doesn't want to work with anybody, knowing that the new person coming in has not had as much experience, but how could that be a coaching moment for them and helping them learn? Like you want to help share the bigger picture.
for not just them, but for the other person. And then that'll usually get them hooked in. If there's any sort of, I would say mutual benefit for them, you have to make sure that that person is kind of aligned to like impactful products, then helping them also say like. It's your responsibility to help others grow as well. And so that's kind of how I did that shift.
What I see in common of all the three transitions is open up new perspectives to people that otherwise would not be open to or would not adopt. So I think that in essence, it's... ability to influence. And having the tools like this, it doesn't make that a lot easier. 100%. I agree with that because I really wish I had these tools when I first started off in management because I got it wrong 100% of the time. And I didn't have these epiphany or aha moments until like...
two or three years ago and i've been managing for a really long time but it just provided a framework or like a way to have this conversation with your team and having a team that's open but you have to model the right behaviors right like you have to model this you have to model the psychological safety for your team to even
want to have these conversations. They have to be bought in. If they're not, it's just not going to work. So the hard part for me was when new people join and they're like, okay, well our first one-on-one shouldn't typically be about superpowers and super traits, you know, and all these different traits and drama triangles.
but you do want to understand when you first meet somebody, how do you get them on board too for a team that's kind of already been operating in this fashion. So it was a challenge, but it was great. It worked out beautifully in the end. How do you do it? Get a new person familiar with this and also be open to it. Yeah. So one of the things that I do is I share a personal operating manual. So I don't know if you all have heard about these. I don't know if anybody talked about this before.
on the podcast but they're like short short and sweet explicit documents on like here's how how to work with me here's what i value And usually that will include the team values too. I don't just have mine, but I'll say like, here's what I care about the most. Here's what the team is caring about the most. And when somebody joins my team for the very first time.
Within like the two weeks of them joining and going through onboarding, I have them write their own personal operating manual and we share it as a team to make sure that we have explicit conversations. The key word there being explicit, like explicit conversations on here's how to work with me.
And in that doc, I actually list out my superpower. So everyone in my team has their superpower listed along with a link to their, you know, the good versus the evil side so that people understand a little bit more on how to work with them. And so when it's time for them to fill this out. We do a similar exercise just to make sure that they have this for their personal operating manual. That sounds really powerful.
A lot of discipline. I want a person. I want one. Yeah, it's just a lot of discipline. But I feel like it's perfect to do it initially in the beginning where there's like. low stakes you know people don't have these crazy perceptions of like what they need to be they don't get influenced by a lot of other people it's like literally just fresh pair of eyes joining the team or the company for the first time
here's how to work with me and like here's my like innate superpower and here's how I could be like useful for the team. That should be a separate episode about that. Yeah, we'll have to table that for a part two to dive deeper into how do you build your own personal operating manual and build your team's personal operating manual because that sounds incredibly helpful in terms of building awareness, increasing communication, making more effective collaboration.
And therefore, like the overall output of the team is exponentially better. And people probably are probably I'm imagining way more happy. Yes, super happy with this. And it takes away a lot of the guesswork, which is like always the best thing.
Usually we learn about these things through trial and error. And by having these frameworks in place, it helps have explicit conversations that will benefit the team dynamic for a long time, which, you know, increases like engagement, happiness, retention, all those great things. But the most important thing is psychological. because you actually know how to work with that particular individual.
Tia, you had mentioned psychological safety. And so one of the superpowers that Pooja, your nominator for the Inspiring Leadership Award mentioned, was about your authenticity as a leader, your vulnerability and ability to create that psychological safety. for all of the different folks on your team. And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about...
the practices or principles that you apply or what this looks like as a leader? The reason why I harp so much on psychological safety is because I recall there was a study called Project Oxygen done by Google in 2015. where they talked about like the key traits of a successful team or a high capacity team. And one of them was psychological safety. And the way to do that was having dependability, structure, clarity, and trust.
which usually helps the team have the key ingredients into making a successful psychological safe team. And so the reason why this is super important to me is because it helps shape the power dynamics and the culture of the team.
to get over like to make sure that we're having like a lot of authentic and real conversations the first thing i do is i use this framework that was created by laura hogan which is like a powerful one-on-one framework to reduce some of the anxiety and like our our first one-on-one questions And I'll ask questions around like grumpiness level, like what makes you grumpy? How will I know? How can I help? I know it sounds silly, but it is very true. Like when you're a new person joining a team.
How do you know what your grumpiness level is and how do I know how to engage with you? The second thing is feedback and recognition because you want to make sure that you do this as a manager and as a person on the team. How does that person like to be? recognize? How do they like to receive feedback and how often? And do they want it in public versus private? Sorry, can you all hear my dog barking? A little bit. Okay, just one second. All right. Sorry about that, y'all. No worries.
So to bring us back, you were talking a little bit about how you were applying the framework you learned one-on-ones and talked about grumpiness level and feedback. What makes you grumpy, Tia? I think... people who don't try that really like gets under my skin and people who complain i don't know it's kind of like on the same vein but i think when people feel like helpless all the time or just feel like they can't do anything that really gets me
pretty grumpy and I don't like being dictated. I don't like having here's exactly how prescriptive you have to be or let me just tell you exactly step by step. I like to lead and learn through autonomy. And so those are a few of my grumpiness traits that I shared with my manager, which was really helpful because she knows not to do that. Jerry, what makes you grumpy?
Well, some pet peeves, for example, not being able to follow up and close the loop and leaving open end is one of the things that just makes me grumpy.
Yeah, Patrick, we have to hear yours after that. I know. I'm like, man, what are the things that make me grumpy? I think, well, the last point that you shared, Tia, really resonated because I feel like... autonomy but also and this kind of happens a lot of times when my mom gives me a phone call is like making an assumption of i want something in one way and
like not having sort of the inquiry or questions to be like well what do you want with this and that tends to happen sometimes when my mom and i chat so that frustrates me definitely makes me grumpy is assumptions and lack of curiosity for sure Gosh, yes, that is it. Thank you for summarizing perfectly. That's the question working in action. Exactly. Yes. So having this framework is super helpful because not only to hear about your grumpiness levels.
But you hear about feedback and recognition and how do people like to be praised? What about if it's bad or controversial feedback? Do you want it to be in private? And so having these things written down, I usually keep a one note with the questions and responses that they give. And then.
That'll help me for when I have conversation with them in the future, I'll follow up. It's kind of like a journal, like on that particular person where I'll start off with these things and then I'll keep adding over time as we meet in like a more monthly, bi-weekly basis and go from there. The third one I left out was goals and support. One of the things I always ask is, how can you help so that we can be aligned? And what are their goals in the next month, three months?
What do you need from your team, your peers, your manager? How can we make one-on-ones the most valuable for you? And this kind of gets people on the right track to just help us have an open conversation and be a little bit more explicit about how they like to approach their work.
One question that occurred to me as we were going through this, Tia, was for somebody who may be early in their process of defining the answers to these questions, do you have... a way to help them out in terms of beginning to think about and define for them what they prefer or what they need in these different areas.
So I tried my best not to define for them because I feel like it's me being in the hero mode again. But what I do typically do is I'll share these questions with them in advance and they'll have time. I'll give them like a week. Like here are the questions that we're going to. And if they don't have that, we can come back in the next one-on-one to discuss, okay, well, let's talk about this a little bit more. Now that you've been here for a month.
Do you feel like you're getting the right support? It allows for you to do quick check-ins. And then that definitely makes people feel good because it feels like you're listening. You're following up on the things that helps them understand how to make them tick.
And that usually gets the conversation going in the right direction. I really appreciate the giving them notice, giving them a week to prepare and think about it, but then revisiting it because that helps them sort of pressure test their assumptions about.
Oh, this is my preference. For me, I'm thinking about like, oh, somebody asked me that question on the spot. That's probably not the right answer. And I would definitely want to change it in a couple of weeks. Yes, yes, yes. That is exactly it. This creates a fun, lighthearted way to just get those initial awkward first one-on-one conversation out the way. But yes, it is definitely up to you to...
make the investment and the follow through, like Jerry was saying, to make sure that we are in alignment. And if you do want to change things, that's completely fine. That's what we want. We're all human. And I think that will just show them that you care.
A funny story or a true story that happened when I had shared this framework with someone on my team. I had a new member joining and I asked her these questions and she started at the end, start crying. And I was like, what's wrong? And she's just like.
I've never had a manager who treated me as an actual person. I usually just get treated as a resource. The first thing they ask is, well, here's this project. I'm going to put you on it. Go. No one's ever taken the time out to actually understand me. And it actually made me do a lot of self-reflection. So thank you. And I just could not believe it that it was.
Just like basic questions and like, what makes you grumpy or, you know, and all that. So she's like, after that, she told other people like, hey, you got to join Tia's team because she really cares. Yeah, I'm happy to have these kind of breakthrough moments for people, which is great. And that is life changing for that person. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, totally. So when I met Pooja, I think a similar thing was.
I didn't go in and first ask her, like, here are your first one-on-one questions. I think when I met Pooja, who thankfully nominated me for this award, it was her being a new manager and helping her understand and navigate how to... be an effective manager at Slack. I didn't want her to come in and not have any guidance. So I was just like there as a sounding board for her. And so providing that safe space to say like, here's how we do things at my old company.
Here's how I'm seeing things done at this new company. Am I thinking about this the right way? And she was really great about being honest and vulnerable as well. But me even saying like, hey, here's how I would approach it. You tell me, let's bring this door through a solution so I'm not always being the hero, you know? And that really helped form our relationship and bond for the later weeks and months and years. Wow. Well...
We have a couple more topics on our list that may probably take us another 30 to 45 minutes to dive into. So I wanted to see if there was a way where we could wrap all of this up and maybe save some of those for a future conversation. Do you have any...
final words of encouragement or inspiration or motivation for an engineering leader at any phase who maybe is trying to find the next way to help support their team or empower their team, do you have any final words of encouragement or advice to help them turn some of these ideas into action? Yeah, I think the advice that I would share is you don't need to have this manager game face. I think there's this perception that when you're a manager, you're supposed to be the person who knows.
the answers to everything, and you have to be super stoic and just get your job done and come in and execute. And while a part of the execution piece is... really necessary with being an effective manager. I think the other part is relationship building. Like you need to invest the time in understanding.
how people work and the results will vary. Like if you spend a lot of time on this, this is great because people will be more open and honest with you. It'll help out with retention for your team and overall like happiness. But if you don't and you make these wrong assumptions, it's not going to go well because you'll be treating people as resources and not humans. So my final word is just take the time to make the investments in the people.
and show that you care by follow up and follow through in action. Here's a quick recap of our takeaways from our conversation with Tia Caldwell. Each of us have been gifted with or have developed certain superpowers. To identify those superpowers and unlock greater impact in your engineering team, here's a few different things that you can do.
Having shared language like the superpower framework around your team's different strengths creates deeper understanding within your team and increased awareness on how to bring the best out of each other. To make more intentional management decisions, make strength-based decisions and pick the best superpower for the project. Pair them with someone with opposite or complementary powers to balance your teams.
When hiring, identify superpowers you think might be missing and use those gaps as a way to find great complementary superpower fits for your team. If you want to help people stretch beyond their current capabilities and develop new superpowers,
Tia's approach is to pair senior staff who are looking to develop leadership capabilities with more junior staff, giving them an execution role model. The key is creating a supportive environment where both are challenged simultaneously to learn and fail in these new different ways.
We've included a link to the superpowers tool from PsyPartners in our show notes. All heroes face conflict. So when you do, how do you respond? This is where having awareness of the drama triangle can make a huge difference. The drama triangle has three sides, or three different default responses. The hero, the villain, and the victim. The hero tends to take responsibility for other people's problems and makes them their own.
The villain wants to win at all costs, blame others, is rigid in their thinking, and puts others down. And the victim often feels helpless or powerless and seeks to validate those feelings instead of ask for help. So what's your default role when you face conflict?
Because once you know, you can use this awareness to transform your mindset and how your team responds to conflict with the empowerment triangle. The empowerment triangle also has three sides, the coach, the creator, and the challenger. If you're in hero mode, you can transform into a coach by empowering others through inquiry. Ask them questions to help them come up with solutions instead of you taking on the problem for them. If you're working with someone who seems to be playing the victim...
shift their focus to become a creator. Focus on the vision and desired outcomes and help them take personal responsibility for taking action to achieve that desired outcome. When you find somebody playing the villain, where they're controlling through criticism and blame. Let them know that what they're saying adds value, but will resonate much more with the team and be so much more effective if they just reframe it in a different way.
Everyone on Tia's team has a copy of the drama and empowerment triangle. We've also shared links to those resources in our show notes. Ultimately, these frameworks serve to help you create greater psychological safety in your team. the more you know how your team works the more you can better increase engagement happiness retention and unlock greater impact
And one more way to make those authentic, meaningful conversations in your teams happen more quickly is in your one-on-ones. Asking questions like, what makes you grumpy, helps break the ice and deepens your understanding in your team.
Other questions like how do you prefer to be recognized or how do you prefer to receive feedback are also absolutely critical to learn. To learn more about one-on-ones and questions you should be asking, check out Laura Hogan's questions for your first one-on-one blog post. We've included that in our show notes.
Explicit conversations like these that create deeper understanding of the strengths and superpowers on your team and that create environments of psychological safety have the power to unlock completely new levels of impact and productivity. as evidenced by the many stories shared today by Tia Caldwell. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a fellow engineering leader.
Also, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a message with your thoughts, feedback, and any ideas you might have for the show. Or leave us a review on whichever podcast platform you're tuning in from. If you love the show, we also have a ton of other ways to stay involved with the engineering leadership community. We also launched the ELC peer group program. Peer groups provide a safe space to uncover solutions to your challenges from a thoughtfully curated group of your peers.
It's not too late to join. ELCP groups are ongoing and you can jump in at any time. But the sooner you join the program, the sooner you'll be able to connect with other leaders who can help you solve your real challenges. To stay up to date and learn more about all. of our upcoming events, our peer groups, and other programs that are going on, head to SFELC.com. That's SFELC.com. Or follow the link in the description. See you next time on the Engineering Leadership Podcast.