Making the transition from being a specialist in a specific technology to an IT leader who owns several business application platforms can seem like walking into a cave with no lights. Sure, I know my stack – but how does that other technology work? How do I make my team and organization successful if I don’t understand it?
While it seems like a daunting task, experts in a single application platform may hold the keys to their own success and know more than they think. In this article, I’ll share key aspects from a recent conversation with someone in this position and look at the strategies we discussed to maintain success in his new leadership role.
Growing Beyond What You Know
Silvia, a member of the UK Salesforce community, recently posted a call for help. She was starting a new job in her current company and was looking for a mentor. Since one of my career goals is to start a coaching practice, I made myself available for a talk in hopes that I could either help her myself or help her find a mentor.
Rising through her organization as a Salesforce implementer, administrator, and system owner, Silvia has demonstrated success in leading her team and transforming her business. Old technology has been retired, processes optimized, and correspondingly, adoption has improved. She’s built a strong Salesforce team and she’s a rockstar.
Silvia’s such a rockstar that she’s been promoted to the Head of Systems and Technology. In the new role, she’ll be responsible not just for Salesforce, but for AI and all other technologies, including SharePoint. For SharePoint specifically, her first project will be a large file migration from a physical server to SharePoint. Together, these technologies will form the backbone of the company’s business technology strategy going forward.
Letting Go of Details
The first part of our conversation was about leadership. Having grown from a developer evangelist into leading a developer relations team, I understand all too well how easy it is to want to continue to be a master of details upon being promoted into leadership. There is a lot of ink spilled and many lessons shared about this transition challenge. She clearly knew this and had experienced this previously, so it was good to find common ground quickly.
So what was the problem? As she put it, she doesn’t know enough about SharePoint to communicate effectively with others about it. With Salesforce, Silvia knows the problems and understands how a solution is architected and how to implement it – she “speaks” Salesforce. Even though she knew that as a leader she couldn’t become a SharePoint expert, she was still troubled. How can she own SharePoint if she doesn’t know SharePoint in detail?
Zoom Out
What she didn’t realize is that, by knowing Salesforce, she already knows a little something about any business application platform. Whether it’s Salesforce, SharePoint, ServiceNow, SAP, or any other software used in running a business, there will always be certain things they have in common.
Think of learning to drive a car, or a bike. Mastering this skill gives you a basis for understanding generally how any vehicle could be piloted. In a car, these are pedals. On a motorbike, it’s a twisty handlebar grip. There will be some system for making sure the vehicle goes in a certain direction like the steering wheel on a tractor or even the tracks of a train. The point is, you don’t need to understand the implementation details of the vehicle to understand that they exist and what they do.
Likewise, business application platforms also have common features. There is a place to put data and a way to build logic and processes for your users. There are rules and permissions that govern who can access, see, read from, write to, and generally manage the pieces of the business system.
There are ways to integrate that system with other systems. Most likely, there will be a way to do some or all of these things with and without code. And finally, there are implementation choices that have trade-offs in delivery time, performance, user experience, upgrade path, and many other aspects of the lifecycle of a piece of enterprise software.
As a leader growing into a role that owns a new software stack, your job is not to build a deep understanding of the stack. Your job is to communicate, listen, ask questions, and build the trust of a team so they can go forth and use their expertise to support the business goals you are responsible for. The road to success lies in finding common ground between the specific platform you know, and the abstract types of problems every implementer encounters with every business platform.
Build a Bridge
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with building a business-level understanding of the technology your team will own. I’ve done this and seen other leaders do this. When the Salesforce developer relations team were building the content to support the Slack acquisition, we held an internal Slack hack day. To participate I built an integration between Slack and Salesforce using the Slack Bolt SDK.
At a previous company, I once taught a training class with our new head of engineering as an attendee. Neither of us were there to build deep expertise in the technology at hand. Rather, our goal was to gain enough knowledge to be an effective leader of the team.
There is also the importance of learning where the implementers of that technology go to learn. The Salesforce community is understandably proud of what we have, but having a community of practitioners is not unique. Most tech communities still use Meetup.com, and major metropolitan areas always have several options to connect with others in person. Social media sites like Reddit, LinkedIn, and others are fertile ground for finding online communities (and very honest opinions). And of course, there are always community and learning options hosted by software vendors themselves.
By building a basic knowledge of a technology and observing the lived experience of other implementers of a technology, you will develop the vocabulary to have more effective conversations with the hands-on experts you have working for you on your team.
Summary
It’s been long enough since I wrote the first draft of this blog that Silvia has now had several months on the job. She reports back that the job is going well. She’s experienced some expected growing pains, but has benefited from some SharePoint training and was surprised how quickly she got her head around it. She is also finding ways to connect more with the Microsoft community to help her in recruiting.
Silvia’s journey shows that career growth takes different forms. If your path and passion take you into leadership, remember that it’s important to learn to rely upon and empower your team to be the experts in the details – but don’t forget what you know. What you know is probably more than just a single technology stack. It doesn’t take much work to step back and understand that the big picture of the tech stack you know will have important points in common with any tech stack.
You just need to learn to abstract the details of what you know into the pieces that all application platforms have in common. By developing business-level knowledge of technologies your team will work with, you can be the glue that pulls disparate teams of many technologies together into a common strategy for your business.