ENGINEERING CULTURE R/EVOLUTION

The tech and engineering industries have long been known for their engineering culture and agile principles. These two impacts how the engineers act, make decisions and how they feel. The tech leaders must draw on that mindset to lead their teams to engage, collaborate and innovate cutting edge products. Agility and engineering culture mindset have helped tech and engineering businesses managing rapid change in the past, while today every day seems to bring a new challenge, among them:

1. The lack of tech talent

The lack of tech talent is an existential threat to the business growth and innovation. Demand for tech talent is greater than supply. The real cost of losing a talented employee is in lowering morale, decreasing productivity and financial costs from recruiting and training new talent to replace the ones you’ve lost.

2. Lack of trust in tech leadership

Disconnected leadership leads to an “us vs them” culture and lack of employee involvement. The real cost is in plans misalignments and delivering on commitments predictably, collaboration and innovation.

3. Tech talent is getting burned out

Engineers are being asked to do "more with less" and the speed and scale of what they create is larger than ever. Burnout is sabotaging talents retention. Burnout have measurable effects on the team's performance. Increased financial costs associated with poor mental health at work.

You might ask how engineering culture and agile principles relate to those challenges.

I have worked on engineering teams at several different organizations and experienced how the culture of engineering overlooks the people it’s supposed to serve.

“Fail Fast. Learn Fast. Improve Fast.” This motto for tech organizations and leadership, is infused in every aspect of engineering culture. It is centered around the innovation of a product at speed and scale, as well as excellence, not around engineers as people.

The engineers are daily working on translating their ideas in the real world so that they can gain mastery in the profession, while they often feel overwhelmed with the questions such as:

“Can we take risks in this organization without feeling insecure or embarrassed?”

“Can we take risks and not be individually penalized if the outcome is poor, versus rewarded for the behavior? “

“Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?”

“Can we trust leaders to listen and support our wellbeing?”

There can be a conflict between "Fail Fast, and Learn Fast" and "always ship on time". Engineers being asked to learn and innovate while ensuring “we don't slip the schedule" is a constant source of tension.  It is also about trust, that leaders will respect their ideas and judgement.

These unique questions do not always resonate with leadership. And the engineers avoid to communicate them openly because of fear, that they will be penalized in some way. As a result, tech organizations are dealing with declining trust in leadership among their engineers.

Looking at the leadership capacity, there is a notable lack of self-awareness, self-leadership and people’s skills. The same is true for engineers. From the organization’s perspective, the companies are not having systems in place to foster trust and psychological safety. Trust deficit directly ties back to the attracting tech talent.

How can we evolve an engineering culture that actually works? How we re-engineer it to the next level?

Good engineering culture starts with the best talent (people) and good environment (ecosystem - processes) for developing talent. Evolving it to the next level kicks off with the following paradigm shifts:  

1. REFRAME THE ENGINEERING CULTURE TO: “People, Process, and Technology” in that order

Put the engineers in the heart of tech. Invest in their personal growth, tech-related competencies and skills to leverage the power of teams. Healthy engineers that embrace conscious leadership and growth mindset contribute to the company innovative edge and long-term success.

2. CULTIVATE FAIL-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT TO ENABLE TRUST AND PSYHOLOGICAL SAFETY

Organizations and their leadership need to secure (enable) fail-friendly environment with trust and psychological safety for their engineers. As Timothy R. Clark stated in HBR Article (February 21, 2022), Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety. Psychological safety is creating a sustainable competitive advantage because it's an engine of innovation.

3. THE IMPORTANCE OF TAKING SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

Each individual employee is important to the tech organization as a whole. They contribute to the evolving engineering culture ecosystem leveraging their self-leadership and full potential.  All employees depend on each other in order to work together toward their common goal.

This interrelatedness requires working hand in hand, with individual employees and the organization's system s towards the common goal, the engineering culture r/evolution.

When a tech organization manages both its talent and engineering culture effectively, the interplay between them creates a virtuous cycle of attracting talent, sparking innovation and creating a culture of trust and psychological safety.