Leading With Passion & Balance

In the fast pace and demanding world of leadership, finding the delicate balance between driving success and maintaining personal well-being can be a daunting task. The pressure we have every day to achieve goals and move fast and deliver results sometimes can move us out of our way and lead to burnouts.

However, effective leadership is not about pushing ourselves to the brink but also about inspiring, empowering, and motivating others. In the meantime, as leaders, we have to preserve our own health and mental well-being. So how do we do that? How do we foster an environment of growth and achievement and moving fast while prioritizing our self-care as sustainable success? How do we view so effective but at the same time we will prioritize our mental health and not get to the edge of burnout?

In this talk, I am going to explore a prioritization framework that I used myself as an analogy for many years that I am going to share with all of you to help you prioritize your tasks and identify what you can delegate, what you have to hold close, and what you have to bring other people on to. I know we are all ambitious and with ambition, which is essential for driving our progress, we set unrealistic goals and some expectations that can lead to overwhelming pressure, both for us and for our teams. So leaders are often bombarded with so many things.

I can look at it as like a needle and a thread. The needle is me and my time and all these threads are threads of work coming my way. I may have to interview a candidate today and I have a project which has a really really critical deadline coming in and I have to put together a timeline document for all of our execution and there is a meeting with a partner team that I have to identify a dependency and I have to run a kickoff for another project which is coming in next quarter. And there is a situation on the team with a team member. Oh my god, I just got a request from a team member, H1B visa request. There are so many things around us.

Whether you are a manager or a tech lead engineer, there are so many things that you have to do on a daily basis and we have to constantly context switch. And I realize a lot of times that I spread myself too thin. I go above and beyond and I try to do everything myself. And this talk is about that. It's about the part of do everything yourself and we want to redefine that because as a leader you do not have to do everything yourself. Leadership is not a self and individual work, it's actually a teamwork and we're going to realize in this talk how do we do that. What I'm going to give you in this talk, I'm going to all talk about threads or you just see in the previous slide, these threads of work that are coming and I'm going to give them three materials. So all of these things coming my way on daily basis, all of these threads, in my mind, they're made of three materials. Some of them are made of glass and we call them glass threads. Some of them are going to be made of beads, so they're threads with little beads in them. And some of them are made of rubber. And based on what are they made of, I will make different priorities and I will identify how do I manage my work based on what are they made of. So let's take a look at those. I'm going to talk about glass threads. Glass threads are work coming your way. It means keep it close, attend to it. As a leader, I need to pay very close attention to these threads.

It is important for me. These threads could be that project that's coming with a very tight deadlines. Those are usually the critical tasks, like if I mislead them or if I mishandle or neglect those type of tasks, my team and organization is going to get impacted. They're very fragile like glass. They demand my ultimate attention and careful management.

These are the things that you have to be on top of. As a technical lead, that project that is so important, you need to be on top of it. That security bridge that just reached a company and everyone is talking about it. You need to be on top of it. I'm going to walk you through multiple examples of these glass threads and we're going to go over how do we handle each scenario together.

Let's talk about that project, right? The company has this launch, which is very major. We all have it and it's within a next quarter. It's very critical. The market needed. Everyone is looking at this feature. This is a glass thread. As a leader and technical lead, you need to be on top of it and hold it close. What we do with glass threads is these are our highest priorities. These are the things we do not delegate and we will keep close to ourselves.

Why this is a glass thread? It's time sensitive. If you miss it, then it's going to be a huge impact. For this, make sure you set clear expectations, milestones, and deadlines. Make sure you're checking regular review progress with your team, ensuring everyone understands why is it critical and everyone is on board on the mission. And ensure you're very proactive and quickly addressing any blockers coming your way. This is a glass thread on your mind and on your day to day work.

Another example, crisis management, production issues. As technical leads or technical people, we know there is always something. There's one crisis. Production is down. You put a PR down, bring down part of the system, and something is malfunctioning somewhere and it has a huge impact in our metrics.

So we need immediate attention. This is a high priority. This is your glass thread. You have to prioritize this over everything else. Make sure that you assemble a crisis management team, you develop clear and transparent communication strategy. You monitor social media, public responses. If this feature is publicly aware and implement immediate corrective address.

Example three, key client relationship management. I mean users, right? There is this important user that your company signed a contract with and something is happening with the user journey. And now they're dissatisfied. So you need to be on top of this. Gather the team to make sure you're going to understand what is going wrong there and actively and empathetically hearing their feedback. Proposed action items. Follow up with the team, gather their input, address all of those action items, and update the client. All of these things are very important for the company and for your day to day work.

So we talked about glass threads. Glass threads are things that you keep close to you. You pay high attention to those because they're very important. And I walk you through multiple examples. And I want you to think about after this talk, for each of these threads, I want you to be able to write down what are the things that are on your plate right now. And categorize them. What are your glass threads right now?

So we talked about glass. And now I want to go over the other threads of work that are beads threads. So beads threads are, why I call them beads. So these are basically made of little dots you can identify as beads. I call them beads because if they fall off my attention, I can pick these beads up. But it's really hard to do it. You have to pick them one by one. So they can fall off my attention, but it's hard for me to actually pick them up again. So these are important tasks, but not as important as glass.

If they fall off my attention, it's going to break down. But still, it's hard for me. So these are important tasks that could be managed through collaboration. And why is it collaboration? Because someone else can hold it for you so it doesn't fall off. But it doesn't necessarily need to be you. It's significant tasks. I talked about a lot of things right now at the beginning. Like I said, we have a migration coming up and I need to be on the top of it. A lot of you doing like company-wide migrations. These type of migrations could be beads because they're important, but at the same time, I mean, it shouldn't be only you, right? These are the things that you can put a team together right away and do it as a team rather than you only. So by partnering with the team and individuals who are the actual experts and capable people who handle this, making sure you're not overburdening yourself to handle things on your own. This is very collaborative. These are the tasks that need to be super collaborative with other people and you pull other people in and you bring a team of diverse skills and expertise to solve that problem.

Let's talk about that system migration as an example. Well, we do have a migration coming in. Our newest one is server-driven UI is coming in all over the company. It shouldn't be me. So we put together a working group or a Tiger team that consists of individuals who are inspired about this migration or are experts to handle this migration and we do it as a team. So this is a very cross-functional team that's going to drive that migration.

And then within this team, you define roles and responsibilities. So you're not the only person driving this migration and you will make it very clear for these team members on these these threads that who's responsible for what and who is accountable for the whole execution. And then whoever is leading it, if it's you leading it or another team member, this is actually a really good growth opportunity for someone else on the team to take the leadership aspect of these type of threads of work. They can set up the meetings. They can coordinate efforts with other teams and also come up with things to monitor progress and report back to you on how you're doing on this migration and escape. So this is Beats.

Another example of Beats is, I mean, if you want a new marketing strategy, let's talk about marketing now. We don't want to be everything IT, but this is like if you have a new strategy developed, any type of strategy within your company, it could be a culture shift. It could be a different type of mission and vision. You definitely put a team together, making sure you talk to different people and gather feedback and then do some research and come up with that strategy. Another example is onboarding people. I mean, if you are in a company that is large enough and has an onboarding program, perfect. But if not, onboarding someone, it shouldn't be all your job as a leader. It should be a team effort, you need to put together a team of people or working group who put together the materials to identify what are the right things to onboard this person onto the team and then assign everybody roles and responsibilities. Someone is a day to day buddy. Someone is going to walk this person through the architecture on the backend. Another person is going to handle everything on the UI side. Someone else is responsible for data and ML. So make sure these responsibilities are scattered within your team, and it's not only you. And then there are these meetings that's happening once a week, or something to kind of like for you to go in and understand what's happening and what's the progress. And you can also come on these beats, Fred, you can identify the progress by one on ones that you are having with these people, like, how are you doing, by the way, on the onboarding program? Where are we with that? So there are many signals that you can get that you don't have to be on top of this to make sure it's driving. And as I said, this is a great opportunity for people to kind of fill in.

And you can also come on these beats, Fred, you can identify the progress by one on ones that you are having with these people, like, how are you doing, by the way, on the onboarding program? Where are we with that? So there are many signals that you can get that you don't have to be on top of this to make sure it's driving. And as I said, this is a great opportunity for people to kind of fill in. So this is the part of like you're empowering and enabling others to fill in for this task. So we talked about glass, the threads that are made of glass, if they fall, they're going to break, they need your immediate attention. Those is top of your list on day to day. We talked about these threads that are threads that if all of your attention, they're not going to break down, but it's hard to pick them up again. So you basically have a team of people taking care of that and you give a bead to each person to take care of and you're basically over visioning the zooming out version of that work.

Now we talk about rubber, which is the last version of this work threads or things that's coming our way and day to day. These are still important tasks, don't get me wrong, but they can be delegated or follow up later. These are the best thing you can delegate to people and be off the hook because the risk is low. So if since this is made of rubber, if it falls off my attention or someone else fall it off, it's not going to break. We can pick it up easily. There is not much huge impact. So with these threads could be tasks that are managed without immediate on my oversight. So mostly it's not critical, it's not urgent. It's not something that is multiple people and collaboration and a lot of cross-functional communication and collaboration. They're usually like focused things that could be done and delegated.

Let's go through some examples like recruitment and hiring. This is one thing that I usually delegate to a lot of people, even on my team. So there are people on your team who have aspirations to become technical leaders or who have aspirations to become managers. A lot of part of this can be delegated. You can leverage your HR, you can leverage your recruiter. You can delegate a lot of part of it to those people. And also you can actually bring in people from your team to actually be part of this process. People who have aspirations of becoming leaders in the future or they're on the path of that, they can actually get a taste of what is it like to interview someone? What is it like to interview someone as the lens of a hiring manager or a technical leader? And that's something that you could do to trust your team to do all that initial screening, interviews, and assessments. And then you can come in at the end and understand what your team perspective is and do the final interview with the candidate. So this is a lot of times something that you can delegate if you have a lot of other things going on.

Second thing is project updates, stand-ups, running a sprint planning, project retrospectives. I mean, these are a lot of things that can be delegated to team members on the team who can grow and become leaders later on on your team. These are the things that can make their collaboration better.

They can make their communication skills better by starting running these meetings. And there are many examples where people on the team, they want to get better at running a meeting, presenting something, or they're just shy talking in public. You want to grow them into those levels. These are really great things to do. Really do and manage all of our stand-ups. Run those or run project retrospective meetings or do a weekly update project meeting and then you just drive those. So these are not the things that you have to do. You can easily delegate.

And the last example on rubber friends, training programs. I mean, if your team needs to go through something as a training and it's easily delegatable because you don't have to actually do that yourself, you can delegate it to someone. They can run the training needs and goals, like as an example, we are going onboarding into TypeScript from JavaScript on LinkedIn and a lot of people have to go through this training program. And what I did, I actually put a TypeScript champion on the team and delegated the training people to this person. So he basically identifies who has to get trained and onboarded into TypeScript. Where are they in the training journey? And then setting up quizzes and examples to make sure they're fully onboarded and being the person that they can reach out to. This is again a type of working task that can grow that engineer, but at the same time, it can offload some stuff off your plate. So you can pay attention to those glass breads that are on your bread and you won't get burnt out. So these are really good examples we went through and we talked about all of these threads of work.

I want to wrap up here. I know this is not a very complicated talk. It's just a simple framework for you, which was very useful for me. And over the years, I realized that as a leader, a technical leader, or even a people manager, I have to realize my limits. It's not that I have to do everything myself and I have to realize what is the right way of delegation and collaboration and building partnership with other people to move things forward. This makes you a way more effective leader and you can get way more things done. It empowers your team. It gives them a full sense of ownership and it actually lightens your workload so you can focus on things that really matter to your attention. At the same time, you're promoting your growth and the skill development of your team members, which is amazing. So with this framework, actually you're delegating wisely, you're partnering wisely, and you know when you have to delegate, when you have to partner, and when something requires your attention.

To conclude, effective leadership, if you're a technical leader, people management is the right balance. And over the years, I came to realize that it's not about doing things again and again and again. It's also about protecting my well-being and doing things effectively, and at the same time, empowering others and giving them opportunities to take on so many things on the team. So it is for me a right balance between ambition of me wanting to get things done and move fast and create impact, and also empathy, empathy for myself, empathy for my team. Because if I'm stressed as a leader, the team is going to be stressed, and I'm going to transfer all of these negative feelings to my team. So having empathy and care for myself and my team, and also at the end, really paying attention to our self-care and mental health and not getting burned out. So that is all. Thanks for watching and listening to me. Feel free to reach out to me on my handle, nasa.dev on my website. You can find my LinkedIn, Instagram, and all my other handles there, and reach out to me if you have any questions.