Mindful Management: Sovereignty

I've been reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting where the authors talk about the importance of the concept of sovereignty.

While it may seem patronizing to compare engineering management to parenting, I believe the concept is very useful in running a happier, more productive organization of any size.


What is Sovereignty?

Most of the dictionary definitions of sovereignty talk about absolute control, free from external influence, like the power of an absolute monarch. Both in terms of real sovereigns (like the Queen of Great Britain, as seen in The Queen.) and the way I'm using it here, sovereignty has many practical limits. The independence and power of a true leader can only continue as long as she serves the best interests of the group she leads.

Good engineers, marketing people, managers, and executives all have an abiding interest in their trade, and ultimately get satisfaction from doing their job well. Unfortunately, many managers, and leaders in organizations hold a notion of how the other people outside their organization should do their jobs, robbing them of sovereignty. Much better is managing in a way that respects people for their ability to create value for the organization. This allows everyone to operate at peak potential.

The rest of this essay will center around the role of the engineering manager and how a mindful engineering manager can facilitate the best result from his or her own team as well as facilitating interactions with other teams such as marketing, quality, customer service and executives. The same concepts can easily be applied to the other job titles.


Managing Engineers

Micromanaging engineers is never a good idea, even if the engineer is inexperienced. Experienced engineers resent it, and can often find better ways than the way they are told. Inexperienced engineers just experience stress and frustration and won't have the opportunity to learn to manage themselves.

Obviously, letting everyone do whatever they want isn't a good idea either.

How then, is a mindful manager to lead his or her team?

1. Know your people. What motivates them,? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their interests? What is the level of their skill?
2. Give responsibility. Assignments should be broad enough to give the individual engineers enough room to innovate, design and create solutions. Responsibility for larger areas, or when things need to be done in parallel for time's sake should be assigned to small groups of people.
   
3. Interdependence. The team's practices should include opportunities to work together, this includes pairs and small teams, as well as cooperative practices such as code reviews and brainstorming sessions.
4. Being clear about what is important. Time, specific functionality, usability. It's also important not to tell them things are important when they are not. This boxes in their thinking.
5. Be firm about what is important, but flexible about how you get it.
   
6. Listen. Be a sounding board, give feedback, offer to help or get help when needed. Take their good suggestions and evangelize them.
   
7. Give them credit for the good ideas.
   
   

Working with other teams and functions

Marketing and Product Management

It's the engineering manager's job to represent and help communicate the marketing team's vision and interests in the shape, design and requirements of the product.
Sometimes this requires marketing to geek translation skills, but often it is just demonstrating that you respect the value of the marketing and product management team. This means actively working with the product management team to understand the requirements and help (with the aid of the engineering team) translate that into a set of technical requirements that can be implemented. When tradeoffs need to be made, the solution the engineering team choses must meet the underlying business need, and the manager should get the marketing manager to sign off based on that common understanding.


Architects

When architects are separate from the engineering team, their needs for sovereignty also need to be respected. Common understanding and respect must also be established. Sometimes the architect's vision cannot be fully realized in a single version. Here the architect should be respectfully approached to help work out a roadmap that reflects the priorities of the details of his or her vision.


Superiors

Directors, VP's and second level managers have a great deal of responsibility for the financial success of a product. As such, their sovereignty concerns often deal with whether or not the product will meet business needs. This includes: marketability, features, quality, and time to market. The mindful engineering manager should focus on these attributes in communicating status, and raising issues that cannot be resolved without executive escalation. Acknowledging the underlying business problem of a particular engineering problem, and inviting the executive's perspective on acceptable solutions is a good way to use the executive's strength and acknowledge his or her sovereignty.


Conclusion

This seems like a lot to juggle, and one might come to a conclusion that no such super-manager can exist. I think, however, that just one manager behaving this way can inspire others to step up, in recognition of their own sovereignty and value. As more people step up and embody this kind of mindfulness, the communications between teams becomes more clear, and conflicts and miscommunication reduced. As the culture of mindfulness grows, morale, self-esteem and the esteem of colleagues is bound to grow as well. Consider this when managing your team.