Building Relationships
Hello there!
Welcome to another week of this newsletter. This week, we got July 4th Holiday in the US, and I took time off today to be with my family. I hope you're able to rest and recover during the weekend.
As a staff engineer, building relationships is one of the central skills you need to carry the job and succeed.
In many cases (or all), you're going to need to enlist the help of others to achieve the expected outcomes. Other scenarios where these relationships come into play are when people think about who can solve a problem for them or who can answer their questions.
Building relationships also helps when calibration season comes along, and you'll need to collect feedback about how effective you've been in the past quarter, year, etc.
As a side note, I'm an extrovert and naturally tend to build relationships with people I meet. Please take into account that as you read through my experiences.
Your teammates
Your immediate team is one of the first (if not the first) relationships you build when starting at a company or new organization.
We often do it inadvertently, but as with any skill, we should be cognizant and do it intentionally. Building a relationship with your teammates helps build trust, get candid feedback, and have people bounce ideas off each other.
I thoroughly enjoyed relationships with teammates when I was starting, and we helped each other improve via sharing blog posts, pair programming, and discussing designs. Most of these people have become my friends outside of work, even when they've moved on to other companies.
Your manager and skip level
Tech companies have the practice of regular check-ins with your manager (1 on 1's).
These will often help you build a relationship with your manager. This relationship will help you to understand the organization at large. Managers are present in many rooms regarding people, projects, and planning, among other things. Another aspect of this relationship is maintaining trust, and delivering your goals, keeping a constant pace of output.
Having this trust from your manager will help you the next time you are looking for "stretch goals" and having wins that will help make your case as you're looking to grow in your career.
The second level of relationship that is good to have is with your "skip level," i.e., the manager of your manager.
Skip-level relationships took time to internalize why I needed to do them and lose the fear of initiating them myself. I found setting up a random 30min with my manager's manager intimidating. With time, I realize that's part of the role of a manager and how valuable that relationship can be.
Having a relationship with your skip level gives you access to more significant scope issues or projects, especially as you're looking for a "staff-level project" to get you to that next level.
You'll benefit immensely from having conversations with your manager and skip level as you want to understand how the company works, your organization, and paths for growth.
Your peers (in other organizations)
These are the relationships that took me the most to start building.
I misunderstood working in projects and teams where Product managers, Program managers, and other groups were present as building relationships with them. What I'm doing now is intentionally setting up a recurring meeting to chat about the projects we might be working on and find ways to help them advance other projects that need attention from our org, unblock them, and generally be of service to their function.
One of the mistakes I made here was setting up a time with everyone I could imagine, which collapsed my calendar for a few months while I attempted to do it all. In the end, I started gauging how often to meet with each of them, and depending on the urgency or relevance to day-to-day work, we set up more or less frequent meetings.
When you report to Sr Manager of managers
Moving from reporting to the manager of a team to a manager of managers, it hit me that I needed to start getting better at building and sustaining relationships with other people more intentionally.
When I first got into the staff level, I was moved from reporting to a single team manager to a manager of managers. What made me realize the need for relationships was when I first changed couples, my old teammates trusted me, but not the other teams I started interacting with. Another instance was when I started noticing gaps across teams, like suggesting a change in process or vouching for a teammate to lead a project. I needed the trust of all the managers reporting to my manager.
I went from dealing with five teammates, one manager, my skip level, and a few peers to dealing with three teams (their managers and ICs), my manager, my skip level, and the peers across the three teams. I also started building relationships with the three teams' skip-level peers.
It felt overwhelming at first, and I failed a lot of times as I calibrated for a new role and scope.
When you report to Sr Director, who manages Directors
When moving from reporting to a Sr manager to a Director or Sr Director who has other Directors reporting to them was a very overwhelming moment, not only because it tripled the number of teams I was dealing with but also made me realize that I needed to become efficient at not only building relationships, trust, and sustaining them.
Otherwise, the number of people I had to keep up with would burn me out.
At this point, I've been trying to keep my calendar in check but also become laser-focused on finding the people I need to engage.
Your Turn
How do you build relationships? How do you calibrate for different scopes of work? How do you keep your calendar in check? Please let me know what you think. You can reply to this email!
Happy coding!
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