My name is Bruce Wang and I've been in various software development and management roles. I am currently an Engineering Director @ Netflix in the Consumer Server Foundations team group leading the Product Platform Systems team (APIs, Product Data Systems and Technology Lifecycle Innovation)
This is a guide to my leadership philosophy and a little about me. You can also read feedback I've received in the past.
Building and sustaining a learning culture in your team or company is a journey. Its difficulty is predicated on the current culture and state of the business, and is different for each company. This doc is a mere guide of the things that I think is important, but should be tailored to fit your current situation. The ideals may be everlasting, but the tactics and how you get there will be different for each team or company!
To build a trusting team, you have to start with the leader. Establishing trust starts with listening as a leader. Your innate drive to be "action oriented" (like myself) could actually hinder your ability to learn from the team and grow with the team. I believe that any team has the solution within itself, yet may lack the agency, inertia or steps to get them there. You as a leader can shine a light on these issues and help guide the team to success.
Toolbelt: Take a growth mindset approach with yourself, and figure out how you're growing and learning as a leader and how do you apply that to your team. Write down what's important to a "thriving team".
Everything begins and ends with psychological safety. Without it, people will lack caring, be disengaged, aloof, standoffish or downright scared. But that's not the worst of it, you won't get the ideas, the diversity of thought, the meaningful discussions between the team and lose out on all the benefits of hiring talented people.
Toolbelt: Model Vulnerability and ask a lot of questions. Encourage discussions from all members of the team, hire for diversity and inclusion. No tolerance for brilliant jerks.
Information is not a weapon to use or to hoard but a powerful unifier that unlocks your team's autonomy and building value for your customers. This means sharing data good or bad, talking about issues openly so that you can invite people to work together to solve them. Don't hide or shield your team, be open about whats going on, they'll figure it out anyways.
Toolbelt: Have meetings and lunches together, talk about what's going on in an informal setting. Use 1x1s to open up to each other.
Giving your team autonomy, which is agency over their decisions and having "freedom and responsibility" is very critical to their success. But what's just as important is giving the time and space for it. If you're too focused on executing towards a deadline, you might not have any time or room for learning and trying new things. Finally, celebrate the learnings, don't frame them as "failures" but as learnings to do better and more next time. A growth mindset comes with its own investments!
Toolbelt: Try Kanban, limit your work in progress and focus on quality and shipping not an arbitrary deadline. Celebrate wins and learnings! Use retrospectives to diagnosis issues and learn from them.
No matter the size of team, setting a purpose and having a vision of what you want is really important. It's the sense of direction that people want, will energize the team and most importantly, serve as a guidepost on what you should and shouldn't be working on.
Toolbelt: Team mission exercise like The Advantage's 6 questions. or identify "3 uniques" of the team
Accountability is essential to a learning environment, thus having goals and making progress against them is necessary. It will tell you how you're doing individually and as a team. It also allows you to prioritize and know if you're doing the right thing. But be very careful, as stated in Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Toolbelt: Use OKRs (objectives and key results) to focus the team and track your progress. Roughly track your bigger goals via JIRA Epics or Trello boards or Airtable.
Excellence can only be achieved if its sustainable. You need to rush and get a project out once in a while, fine, thats understandable. But if you have to constantly sprint and burnout your entire team, that won't work for the long term. As described in The Making of a Corporate Athlete, it is not the stress that hurts the individual, but its inability to recover.
Toolbelt: Normalize the language of burnout. Think about "oscillation", between stress and recovery. Grow your physical, mental, emotional and spirtual (in a work sense) capacity.
Let's not forget we are all in this for our customers. None of this matters if not for the end goal, which is to maintain the business or organization for the long term and continue to grow and build joy in your customers.
Just like building a high performance team through sustainable methods, a business's goal can not just be about the enrichment of its leaders and shareholders. It has take a take into account other stakeholders like customers, employees and the community. It also is not about one quarter or yearly performance but to last for generations. How do you ensure what you do can be sustained for years and last beyond your own personal tenure or goals? Approach leadership in this way too, are you leaving the team in a better place than you came into it?
Toolbelt: Read Simon Sinek's Infinite Game or Leaders Eat Last. Create a succession plan. Do you have a team "diaster recovery plan" in case one or more folks leave the team?
You must deliver on immediate goals while planting seeds for the future. Challenge yourself to think about how you can do both? Can you hold your growth flat, yet still achieve your team's goals? Can you remove that piece of debt and deliver new features? Can you use the new major project to push your architecture forward instead of serially applying it? How do you push changes quickly and provide safety to your systems? Every decision is about the nuance of the balance, and many times we tend to default to the near term.
Toolbelt: Reading Winning now, Winning later by David Cote for inspiration. If a Fortune 100 CEO can turn around a company, while delivering on quarterly numbers AND investing in the future, you can do it too!
I like to think of myself as a "humble gardener" (from the book Team of Teams), the idea of a leader who helps toil the soil, water the plants, and relishes in watching the team thrive and grow. My proudest moments are when my teammates or folks I mentor succeed in their own ambitions, knowing I had a small part in that.
(I adapted the below from the Finding my ideal leader exercise)
I think "caring" is so important, I wrote an article about it. It's not just that I care about you as a person, your background and your growth but I also care that I create an environment to allow your caring to flourish. There is a concept of "discretionary effort" and I believe caring about your company, teammates and yourself is what drives the most of it out of people.
I am an entrepreneuer at heart which means I love trying out new ideas and seeing if it'll actually work. Thus, I lean towards action and executing. I might read an article, synthesize the learnings and then apply the concepts the very next day (I consider this my superpower). It's not that I am fickle, I just want to see if I can apply what I learn quickly. And if an idea works, I will continue to iterate and refine it over time.
I believe sharing information is the key to our success. I think the only way we can act with autonomy is to have all the necessary information to make decisions. This also bleeds into who I am as a person, and I am an open book and am very comfortable with being vulnerable and saying "I don't know" or "I messed up".
I like to create a fun environment because what we do can be pretty stressful. I enjoy building a jovial rapport with my team, and spark joy in their work. I am also an eternal optimist so difficult situations at work doesn't get me down (as much) and I always look the positive angle. While many people think I am an outgoing fun-loving extrovert, I am really an introvert (or maybe ambivert) and enjoy being alone every so often to re-charge.
As it turns out, a positive mindset is a strategic advantage as detailed in The Happiness Advantage.
I need to reconcile what I (or the team) is doing with the company or team's mission. Values means something to me, and I like to know why I am doing anything. If there's dissonance between values/goals/mission and actual actions, I will push back. I also like to understand underlying assumptions of any project and determine if we're achieving the benefits we set out to gain.
My Mentorship Page
My Calendly
@batman on Rands Leadership Slack
My Pet Peeves - laptops at meetings (slightly changed now with hybrid/virtual meetings), meetings without agendas
My Failings - Talking too much or dominating a conversation, being late to meetings (better now), prioritizing work
Fav Food(s) - Chinese, Sushi, Vietnamese, Mexican, but really all kinds, I am a foodie :) .
Fav Dessert - creme bruele, egg tart, tiramisu
Teams
Drive by Daniel Pink - Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose are the key motivators
Team of Teams by General Stanely McCrystal - be a humble gardener instead of a heroic leader, have common purpose, shared consciousness and empowered execution (very similar to Drive)
What google learned from its quest to build the perfect team - Psychological Safety is the powerful force to drives great teams
The Competitive Imperative of Learning by Amy Edmondson - Execution for Learning over Execution for Efficiency
Forget the pecking order at work - having super chickens doesn't mean you'll be more productive, having a diverse team does
Execution
Measure what Matters by John Doerr - OKRs to help focus, align, measure and stretch, CFRs continuous, feedback, rewards to re-inforce the goals
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - Prove your startup assumptions and iterate or pivot
Winning now, Winning Later by David M. Cote - How companies can succeed in the short term, while investing for the long term.
Netflix's "Seeking Excellence" Culture Memo - people over process, freedom and responsibility, be candid and encourage independent thinking
What makes a great engineering manager - how a manager thinks about vision, people, technical, execution
Personal Growth
From Strength to Strength by Arthur C Brooks - how to think about success and happiness in the second half of your life, especially poginant for strivers and overachievers. Thinking about moving fluid intelligence to Crystallized intelligence (and also explains why I so enjoy mentoring).
The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor - positive psychology have shown that happiness fuels success, not the other way around.
Making of a Corporate Athelte - Need oscillation cycles of stress and recovery, how to increase your physical, emotional, mental, and spirtual capacity.
Think Again by Adam Grant - Rethinking cycle of Humility, doubt, curiosity and discovery. Are you a preacher, prosecutor or politician with your ideas?
Getting Naked, A business Fable by Patrick Lencioni - Don't be driven by fear of losing the business, being embarrassed or being inferior, be curious
Radical Candor by Kim Scott - Care deeply, challenge directly
Give and Take by Adam Grant - Be "Otherish", helping others while taking care of oneself's needs
The Working Genius - Six types of working genius: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galavnizing, Enablement, Tenacity. I am an Evangelizing Innovator.
Here's my trello collection of leadership articles
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent
