At Human-Centric Engineering we are hosting conversational forums for people involved in the software engineering ecosystem to explore and share our struggles and insights from a human perspective.
Next Friday, 23rd February, at 12:00 GMT our Friday Forum is dedicated to the challenges of letting go of control and letting others take the lead.
Registrations for the free events are available here:
https://lu.ma/human-centric-engineering
Here is a video with John and Simon sharing their thoughts, touching on the difficulties we face when we relinquish control and have to trust others. This is a common challenge for Engineers when they step up to management and they have to let go of being the expert.
Over-controlling managers have the effect of reducing the agency of engineering teams, risking apathy, learned helplessness, and unnecessary bottlenecks as they need to seek their manager’s approval for decisions they could be making themselves.
Learning to let go of control is uncomfortable at first, but it is a necessary part of scaling. Once we give teams a clear direction, ensuring they have the information and skills to act, then we can hand over the reigns to a motivated, self-organised, autonomous teams. Trusting individuals and teams takes advantage of the Pygmalion effect, where people rise to the level of expectation you place upon them.
“You can’t unit test your team.”
One of the key light bulb moments for us was Simon’s insight “You can’t unit test your team” in the segment starting around 12:00 mins, as we were exploring the differences beteen having control over the complicated things we encounter with code and computer systems, but we can’t control complex adaptive systems in the same way, such as software engineering ecosystems involving human beings and human relationships.
Control is often an illusion, and the ripple effects of over-controlling can create a creeping bureauracracy that slows everything down.
We hope you enjoy the conversation and learn along with us, and we hope to see you soon in our online Friday Forums.