2 Comments
User's avatar
Michael Banner's avatar

“One of the strongest teams I had worked with had gone through a time when they didn't have a manager, and in that time they had built up their own ways of working and had organically developed process' that suited them. I joined a team that was already running, and was already self-organising.”

This is exactly the same experience I had. My team had been without a manager for close to 12 months by the time I joined, so much so they were working effectively, just not necessarily efficiently.

It was a push-pull situation as my manager wanted me to demonstrate some leadership prowess, yet they weee doing a pretty good job as it was. In the end I just did a bit of a team reset to align on vision, and coached the engineers at an individual level on some career stuff. The rest didn’t need to change all that much, and that’s fine!

Expand full comment
James Bedford's avatar

Interesting to hear you had a similar experience Michael. It has certainly made me question my role as an engineering leader, and forced me to look at where my value add is for the teams I work with.

Expand full comment