Ask your commercial leaders what they think about the engineering team. What do they say? And with how much conviction?
This is one of the first things I do when I join a new business. More often than not Iâll receive a positive but relatively passive response. âThey seem decentâ, âTheyâve built some good stuffâ, âThereâs some good talent in thereâŚbutâ. In NPS terms, theyâd sit squarely in the 6-8 areaâŚ
Here Iâm going to run through why you want to turn them into internal promoters, and how to do it with a few simple changes.
Why you need internal promoters
1. Business cohesion and effectiveness:
Team reputation permeates every level. Frustration between teams can seed a broad division that makes effective cross-functional teamwork increasingly difficult. This often looks like stakeholders pressing false deadlines to drive output, engineers pushing increasingly conservative estimates to alleviate pressure. This adversarial spiral ultimately lowers business effectiveness. Trust sits at the heart of open, honest collaboration.
2. Recognition and team morale
Itâs nice to be recognised. Nothing kills the morale of a team more than working hard to hit a target, only to be greeted by a muted response from passive stakeholders. Only promoters give unprompted and regular praise, and the impact on morale is huge.
3. Group autonomy
Maybe you want to run a hackathon, or maybe you want to do that big refactor. No matter how you paint it, business stakeholders will see these things as frivolous engineering activities. If your stakeholders are promoters, you wonât hear a single objection. Ultimately they trust that your system works and they donât need to interfere or push their agenda. Where that trust doesnât exist, questions will be asked at every turn.
4. Personal brand and trajectory:
A promoter will help drive senior promotions. Simply put, they want more of your brand across engineering. When asked if they know a good engineering leader 3 years down the line, your name will come to mind. Neither of these things will happen if youâve left a neutral impression.
Why they probably arenât promoters yet
If youâre asking this question and youâve read this far, Iâm going to assume that your team is pretty talented, you work hard and you consider your output decent. So why are you only getting a lukewarm reception?
In my experience, the reason is simple:
- Good stakeholder management is 50% output, 50% optics
- Most engineering leaders under-appreciate and underinvest in optics
- To build promoters, you need to nail both
âOutputâ here is the work delivered by the team, while âopticsâ are the way the delivery of the project is perceived. If your output is good then youâre in luck, optics are the easy part and can be changed overnight.
Below are three rules to get optics right. Note that it isnât just the manager who needs to follow these rules, the whole team needs to get onboard.
Getting optics right
1) Go beyond transparency
Imagine you lose your wedding suit a week before your wedding. You request a new one and it arrives just in time. Now imagine two different approaches to communication from the suit company throughout:
a. âTransparent updatesâ:Â Youâre given a 5â7 day estimate and receive regular updates about progress until it arrives 5 days later.
b. âVisible urgencyâ:Â Someone messages to explain theyâre going to personally make this happen, theyâve pushed your order up the queue and theyâre going to use a courier to cut down delivery time. They celebrate each step with you until it arrives 5 days later.
In both cases, the output is the same. But only in case b) do you come away with a memorable customer experience, one youâd actively promote or recommend to others. The same is true for engineering, but most engineering leaders opt for a). Visible urgency matters, it shows stakeholders that you care about the same thing.
2) Celebrate pragmatism
âIf I didnât push, everything would be over-engineeredâ. The honest words of an ex-colleague from Product. He is by no means alone in feeling this way, this is a widespread view of engineers amongst business leaders. In a world where this is the default assumption, a reputation for pragmatism sets you apart.
Now consider the last 3 presentations given by engineers to the business. They probably covered areas like system quality, security, reliability, scalability etc, so called âengineering concernsâ. If this is the only thing you celebrate publicly as a team, you are actively fuelling the above assumption.
Start celebrating cases of pragmatism too. These things already happen, but you probably donât shout about it. You should if you want to build up a reputation for pragmatism, which will boost evangelism among commercial stakeholders.
3) Collect and action feedback
Your team is your product, so ask your customers what they want, act on the feedback and tell them about it. This is so simple, but so rarely done. When was the last time you asked another leader how they feel about your teamâs performance and what your team could do better to meet their needs?
In Conclusion
Optics have a fundamental impact on stakeholder satisfaction, but very few engineering leaders consider them. A few simple changes to the way you and your team present yourselves and your work can have a drastic impact on your teamâs reputation, morale, alignment and your own personal career trajectory.