Leads define culture

For a long time I’d ran my team while wearing many different hats across design, engineering, and product leadership. So it was that ~3 years ago, I was delighted to welcome in dedicated new leadership, focused on each of these disciplines.

There’s a bunch of focus on team culture in our industry, but I’ve seen relatively little discussion around the importance of leadership culture, and specifically multi-lead leadership culture and how leads hold themselves accountable to each other and their teams. Culture goes both ways, and it’s critical that it starts with leaders.

With this in mind, we started a leads culture document with the goal of capturing, in writing, the key points about the team’s leadership culture that were most important to maintain.

Here are some of those key traits that we focused on. Each topic probably warrants its own article and comes from many, many years leading a talented group of design-minded engineers <3

1. Our team is your primary interrupt.

2. You set the example.

3. You challenge the status quo.

4. You are available.

5. You pace yourself.

6. You are confident, yet malleable.

7. You practice responsible hand-offs.

8. You are in tune with the team.

9. You are in tune with your fellow leads.

10. You are opinionated while celebrating a diversity of opinions.

11. You are always growing.

12. You practice intentional empathy.

I suspect that leaders of any group, large or small, can benefit from a similar exercise and sharing the output with their team. Think of it like a “Manager Readme”, but for a group of leads :)

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