LW - Categories of leadership on technical teams by benkuhn

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Categories of leadership on technical teams, published by benkuhn on July 22, 2024 on LessWrong. This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Recently I've been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I've referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is useful for a couple reasons. One is that it helps you get more concrete about what leading a team involves; for new managers, having an exhaustive list of job responsibilities is helpful to make sure you're tracking all of them. More importantly, though, we often want to somehow split these responsibilities between people. Team leadership covers a huge array of things - as you can see from how long this post is - and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt. Even if you do find someone good-enough at all of them, they usually spike in 1-2 areas, and it might be higher-leverage for them to fully focus on those. Here's a breakdown I use a lot:1 Categories Overall direction The most important responsibility a team's leadership is to ensure that the team is headed in the right direction - that is, are they working towards the right high level goal and do they have an achievable plan to get there? Overall direction tends to get input from many people inside and outside a team, but who is most accountable for it can vary; see Example divisions of responsibility below. Overall direction involves working on things like: Setting the team's mission, vision, or charter Choosing the team's goals, plans and roadmap Prioritizing the various different projects the team could take on Communicating the above, both to team members and to people outside The most important skill for getting this right is having good predictive models (of both the team's domain and the organization) - since prioritization is ultimately a question about "what will be the impact if we pursue this project." Being great at communicating those predictive models, and the team's priorities and goals, to other stakeholders is also important. Good team direction mostly looks like the team producing a steady stream of big wins. Poor direction most commonly manifests as getting caught by surprise or falling behind - that is, mispredicting what work will be most important and doing too little of it, for example by starting too late, under-hiring, or not growing people into the right skillset or role. Other signs of poor direction include team members not understanding why they're working on something; the team working on projects that deliver little value; friction with peer teams or arguments about scope; or important projects falling through the cracks between teams. People management People management means being responsible for the success of the people on the team, most commonly including things like: Coaching people to improve and grow in their careers Designing and overseeing hiring processes for their team Setting and communicating performance expectations and evaluating against them Day to day, the most important responsibility here is recurring 1:1s (the coaching kind, not the status update kind). Others include writing job descriptions, setting up interview loops, sourcing candidates, gathering feedback, writing performance reviews, helping people navigate org policies, giving career coaching, etc. The most important skill for people management is understanding people - both in the traditional "high EQ" sense of being empathetic and good at seeing others' perspectives, but also in the sense of knowing what contributes to high performance in a domain (e.g. what makes someone a great engineer or researcher). It's also important to be good at having tricky conversations in a compassionate but fi...