The power of optics
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. As you’re reading this, I’m visiting my home country in a work trip, so a very quick operation.
I hope you had a good weekend! I spend mine recovering from red eye flight.
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Things I discovered in the past week
How to become a more effective Engineer is a post in The Pragmatic Engineer from guest Cindy Sridharan. She has an older version of this post in her Medium blog if you want to look for it. But the post in general is s good way to understand how to execute at higher levels while being an IC.
Who turns software into Money? GTM is a post from Jessica Kerr, always interesting thoughts on her blog. I recommend giving this one a read
With my most recent projects, I had conversations about how to better manage “optics” with leadership.
The management of “optics” is a required skill at large organizations. While using optics tends to have a negative connotation, in practice, we’re not talking about deceiving anyone, but managing the message we share with leadership. Shaping the message, and tailor it to the audience.
I generally talk about optics in the context of projects. What I’ve had experience in the past is leadership not understand the current progress of the project, or when blockers happen sometimes the explanations might be too detailed and leadership doens’t understand how to help effectively. Other times we might be getting questioned constantly with project details, and that might indicate leadership is not getting the information at the right time.
Walk the Talk
The reason I not consider it as deceiving, is because you have to be congruent with your message and your actions.
If they’re not truly aligned people will notice and you’ll lost trust. I would suggest not trying to shape a message if you’re not already taking actions towards progress, or leadership at least perceive you as an effective teammate. I’ve seen people think that they alone can shape a narrative and fail.
Not just you
Where being congruent help is that you’re not in isolation delivering projects at large corporations.
It takes one teammate not being aligned or having a shared vision to tumble your message. It’s important to share a vision with your teammates, and cross-functional managers, for example. That way we all help each other if we’re seeing the same issue with leadership.
Take the opportunities
One way to further the reach of your message is to actively take steps to present it widely.
Take the opportunities to present at all hands, or brown bag sessions, etc. Other times, in a conversation your might interject your message, basically making it top of mind to leadership.
Power is leverage
In the end managing the optics of projects gets you a higher degree of trust from leadership.
That is currency that you can spend in your next projects. But if you get better at this, you probably won’t need it that much!
Your turn!
Have you every tried to manage optics with leadership, how they perceive a project going slowly, or understand the delivery of a project? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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