Lessons in how to lead engineers from Google

00:03 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Welcome to HR Disrupted with me, lucy Adams. Each episode will explore innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals and challenge the status quo with inspiring but practical people strategies. So if you’re looking for fresh ideas, tips and our take on the latest HR trends, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So whenever we ask HR professionals about the biggest barriers to innovative people practices, they almost always mention leaders and managers, and this is particularly true in sectors such as engineering and technology. You know they tell us that because engineers respond well to process, they struggle to move away from the perhaps more bureaucratic people processes in favor of moving to more fluid, agile approaches approaches. Well, in this episode, we’re going to prove that engineers can absolutely make great people managers and we’re going to find out what HR can do to work with them more effectively.

01:12
So I’m delighted to welcome my guest today,

01:15

01:16
, who is a Senior Staff Engineering Manager at Google, based in Silicon Valley. Welcome, kiran Bir, thank you Good to have you with us today. So you’ve got about 15 years more than 15 years of experience in shaping and leading teams. You know, at the forefront of AI, augmented reality, gaming, mobile apps. So you’ve really got the great CV, haven’t you? You’ve kind of ticked all of those boxes, and that’s both at Google and, prior to that, at Microsoft. So you’ve got the big brand names as well. But can you just talk to us about your a brief overview, if you like, of your journey into people leadership?

02:00 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely yeah. As you mentioned, I’ve been in the space for over 15 years now and I started as an individual contributor and software engineer at Garmin and Apple. It was really Microsoft where I had my first opportunity to start as a people leader, first level manager, build teams, and I spent nine years there.

02:23 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Just on that. Did you want to be a people leader and manager?

02:27 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
I did, I did. You know, that was something that was probably one of my goals when I first started my career. It just seemed like the natural progression at that time. But I wasn’t really sure, and Microsoft gave me an opportunity to try it out, and that’s actually where I learned the most, because I made a lot of mistakes along the way.

02:48 – Lucy Adams (Host)
What kind of mistakes were you making?

02:51 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, you know, I would say one of the first things was micromanaging. Honestly, it’s something I think a lot of people do early on. But it was a great company because they also let me learn from those mistakes and correct those mistakes and learn how to be a better manager, and so I held up that skill over a decade at Microsoft, building teams, working with them to be self-sufficient, transforming teams, going through management and team challenges, and that kind of became a big portion of my career and I’m doing that at Google now as well.

03:25 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And did you get any formal training to be a people leader? Is that something that Microsoft and Google invest in?

03:32 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, it absolutely is. So when I first started at Microsoft, you’re actually just kind of putting the role. That’s what happened about a decade ago, I think the idea was just let’s make somebody the manager. If they’re maybe one of the better engineers on the team that can communicate, let’s make them the manager. And if they want to be the manager, great.

04:02
But Microsoft had actually invested quite a bit in my second year in leadership training for managers whether it was their first year or their 10th year and that actually also helped inspire me to understand what is my role as a manager. What is it as a leader as compared to just driving a team? So they actually did invest heavily. And I remember in one of the sessions it was an interesting statistic they mentioned that in all of these sessions they would follow up with people one month later to see if they remembered anything from the session and the answer is actually surprisingly low. Like 10 or 15% actually remember details and maybe only 5% actually practice those. But that was actually a really good statistic to hear to understand hey, try things from these trainings it’s not just formalities and experiments. That was a big portion of those messages that they gave us advocate.

05:01 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Try and avoid those big intensive programs because you know we’re going to forget 80 percent of what we’ve learned within a month, not because we’re stupid, but because we’re human. Right, and that’s what the human brain does.

05:12
If you’re not practicing yet, it just filters out. So there are, I think, better ways in which we can support leaders and managers it’s. Do you feel that there are, that there’s an a career path for you as an engineer, senior engineer, senior tech guy, where you don’t have to take on people? Do they have those kind of parallel and alternative paths?

05:36 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Absolutely. I think that’s one thing we’re seeing a lot in companies now is we want to ensure that people have growth paths. That isn’t necessarily through management alone. In fact, a lot of the promotions I’ve seen at my current company and my last company, they’re in favor of individual contributors because we want to make sure that those skills aren’t starved and there’s a different set of training and career path that you need to take to be a better manager and we understand the differences and we want to show that there’s growth path in both of those areas. In fact, one of the big changes we have now is if we ask somebody if they want to be a manager and there is even the slightest hesitation, we don’t force it on them. So that’s the biggest changes.

06:23 – Lucy Adams (Host)
That is so true. You know a lot, of, a lot of HR’s time. You know my profession, my discipline, a lot of my time and those of my peers is spent compensating and propping up the poorer experiences of working for managers who just never wanted it, you know, but they couldn’t see an alternative career path. You know, it was like I want to progress, I want to earn more money, I want to increase my status, I want to grow, but the only way I do that is I suddenly inherit this bunch of people who are now looking to me to help coach, communicate with guide, and actually that’s not me. You know that’s not what I want, and so that’s interesting is that you know if there’s a moment’s hesitation, it’s like this isn’t for you, but there are alternative paths. I think that’s really Absolutely so. When did you kind of sense that you were actually pretty good at this? Yeah, I think leadership.

07:22 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
That’s a good question. I think it was actually sensing first that I’m pretty bad at it. Um, yeah, uh, you know, I I think my my second year into management. Um, I, I was realizing that I was spending a lot of time trying to get my team to operate like I did, um, and I noticed that people weren’t happy coming into work. Um, and the funny thing was I was given a project, um, and in my mind I was like, if, if I have eight people like me, we can go through this fast. And that was what motivated me.

08:12
And what happened was I didn’t have time now to work with every single engineer in every single area. I was actually so busy that I just had to let go of these other areas and I couldn’t follow with each of my engineers. But what surprised me is they hit all of the goals and they did it effectively without me, and I realized I was actually getting in the way of their success and they were bringing ideas that I wouldn’t have even thought about, and it made me realize my goal is to kind of get out of the way and empower them to do more, and that made me realize I need to become a better manager actually, and I realized the power of leading teams. So that was really what started my journey into trying to be a better manager and I started establishing values that I thought were important, looking at the problems on my team. The first was building trust and autonomy, which is the opposite of micromanagement. You know, I was reading about how does Netflix operate and that was one of their key values and I was like this is important to me. This is going to be my first value, because I realized this is my own fault, this is my own area to address.

09:17
And then one of the other funds that came up was when you have a team of high performing people all caring about growth, you don’t want them to attack each other in terms of who gets to work on what. So I had another value, which was everybody gets a turn, but the term people use these days is equity and opportunity. And as I started practicing these things and seeing my team respond and seeing everybody grow and morale grow, I think what gave me the realization was I’m doing this well and I was asked to take on another team that was going through issues. So that’s what kind of re-encouraged me is my leadership saw I was getting better at this. They were giving me opportunities to correct myself, and then they asked me to go do that with other teams as well there’s.

10:01 – Lucy Adams (Host)
there’s so many important points in there about leadership. I want to pick up one of the ones that just really hit me, which was this moving from micromanaging to creating an environment of trust and autonomy. And of course, we all know that if we think about the person that we loved working for, that we probably did our best work. For typically they said I trust you, you know what do you think, show me, you know, you go ahead, you get on with it and I’m here if you need me, but I’m not going to stand over you and dictate.

10:35
And yet, when you’re a new manager in particular, you know you’re worried about results, you’re worried about delivery, and so the tendency is to kind of grip tighter, isn’t it, and to think you know, I’ll just, I’ll oversee it, I’ll. You know, and I’m guilty of doing this with my own team today, if I get stressed, the first thing I do is get straight into that micro task management and have to kind of reel myself back and say, no, actually I’ve got a team of incredibly capable, highly motivated people. As you say, get out of the way rather than being an overseer of the work. How did you balance that kind of desire for giving autonomy and trust and creating an environment where people could challenge the status quo and come up with innovative and different ways of doing things, but at the same time feeling comfortable about delivery and accountability. How did you get to that place?

11:37 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
That’s a great question. I think for a lot of new managers it goes back to the point you mentioned Results are expected, and that’s true, but I think the big difference that I’ve taught managers in my organization is results in the long term make a difference instead of just the short term. And the biggest aspect to take away from that with trust and autonomy is allowing room for error and mistakes. The more comfortable you are with your team making mistakes and learning from them, the more they’re going to grow and the more effective they’re going to be. And I think that is the biggest portion of trust and autonomy is. I trust you to work on this and try to get better at this every day, but you’re going to make mistakes and you should learn from those mistakes, and I think that is actually the key here in giving autonomy is allowing room for growth. That’s that’s truly the aspect managers have to be comfortable with and know that that’s going to actually help in the long term.

12:45 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, and it’s a. It’s a very difficult balance to strike. One of the techniques that we’ve heard about that we love is something that Telenor use, which is called tight, loose, tight management, and so it’s tight on expectations, being really clear about the outcomes that you’re looking for, the impact you want them to have. Then you loosen up in terms of how they do it, maybe when or where they do it. You know you’re kind of creating some space for experimentation, innovation, people finding their own paths. But then you tighten up again in terms of being really clear on accountability and delivery. And and I think we often miss that middle bit out, don’t we? We’re so keen to kind of deliver and get, get, get the results, but we, we smother and, as you say, we’re not, we’re not growing people, we’re not allowing people to make decisions, to make choices, albeit that they might make the wrong ones, but then they learn from it. It’s a very different type of leadership and one, as you say, that really gets those long-term results.

13:50
I want to have a look now at people in engineering and tech environments in which you are steeped, and you know this gang. All right, you know that. You know this is your, this is your tribe Right. You know this is. These are the people that you know and and work with every single day. And I think sometimes, particularly if you’ve got an organization that perhaps hasn’t had as much investment in the digital area but are having to for obvious reasons, because every business is now a digital business and they’re trying to attract, retain, develop tech and engineering staff, there’s a sense that they are slightly different. You know that they are these almost mythical beasts that they need to try and understand, and I don’t know whether this is true or not. I’ve never particularly worked in tech and engineering, but what is it that employees in tech and engineering in your experience are looking for? Because I want to see whether it’s wildly different to the sectors that I’ve typically worked in and that I know.

14:58 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, that’s a great question, you know. I think at the root of it, everybody wants a lot of the same things. Definitely, with different economies, different things change because tech has different compensation standards sometimes. But you know, one of the common things is growth, whether that’s growth in career growth and learning promotions. That’s something that everybody typically asks. You know, it’s one of the first conversations every new member drives with me now, actually, it’s very different.

15:33
Yeah, it was very different a decade ago, where managers would initiate the conversation around review time, and now what I find is, even in the interview process, that is one of the first questions people ask me is what is my growth going to look like at this company? What are my plans? So I think that is definitely something I see a lot more in tech recently, and I have to imagine this is something everybody cares about. People want to know how to advance. There are some differences, though.

16:06
This is one I’ve talked about with my wife a lot, because she’s in the financial sector, which is different, and one thing that surprised her and also surprised me is the amount of training you get when you start a job. When she was working at a bank, you know, I think they spent 60 days on actual training, yeah, and, and I was like, wow, you know, we have like a one day new employee orientation and we just give them work right away, and I think that’s one area both sectors can learn from. You know, on the engineering side, we have to realize it takes more than a day to get people understanding the systems ramping up. To get people understanding the systems ramping up, you know, some people can do it faster, but we have to allow for that. And I think in some of the other places you can learn that if you overly train and overly fit, you remove opportunities for new ideas too. So I think that’s one aspect.

17:13 – Lucy Adams (Host)
I think it’s really interesting, I mean funn. Funny enough, my business partner and I were running a session today on new ways to onboard people and one of the things that we were talking about was exactly this. It’s this kind of you know what is onboarding actually about? And I think quite a lot of organizations focus on getting people trained, getting them up to speed with compliance. You know one one poor person had to fill in 70 standard operator, read 70 standard operating procedures and initial every one.

17:48
You can’t take all of that in, whereas, interestingly, I think in the tech sector and we gave a couple of examples today this focus on getting people to be productive and contribute on day one is much more in evidence, and I actually think that’s a good thing, because I think there is nothing worse than being the new girl or the new boy and sitting there plowing through paperwork and you see all your team really busy and you go home and you say to your wife or your husband or your parents or your kids you know, I didn’t do anything today, whereas I think, if you’re able to feel like you’ve contributed to something, of course it’s a balance, isn’t it? But I don’t think it’s a bad thing and that’s interesting. That’s one of the things that’s quite expected in the tech sector that you expect to be productive and contributing really fast.

18:38 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know that’s one thing that’s also very exciting about being in the tech space and it’s something I think other companies can learn from, because there was a expression I heard from someone who was working at OpenAI about a leader that they really appreciated, and that leader would come in every Monday and start the week saying what are we delivering this week, what is the new thing that we’re going to do this week? And I think that’s just a really motivating message to hear every week what are we doing different this week? So, yeah, I think for a lot of other places where it might seem more process heavy and doing the same thing every day, that can lose excitement too, and I think that’s a place they can learn from.

19:25 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, I always remember that when I worked at the BBC, we had a head of our online, the digital space, and he’d come from a tech background, obviously, rather than a television and media background, and he used to talk about shipping products. You know, it was all like we’ve got to ship the product, we’ve got to ship the product and, uh, and it always sounded so much more exciting than the stuff that we were doing. You know, shipping products and he’s like slap his hand, like I’m doing that, and it just sounded so, so, so exciting and agile and fast paced and and that’s not something that that you know every sector is like.

20:01 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Clearly, yeah, I mean. It’s nice to be able to get to a place where you feel proud about what you did every week or every month.

20:09 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, yeah, okay, look, let’s. Let’s just turn the focus, then, onto leaders such as yourself in tech and engineering environments. And you know, I started with my experience of what a lot of my colleagues in HR will say, which is, oh, leaders are a nightmare very often, and engineering leaders are the worst you know, because they will not work without a process. And is that your experience? Can you understand, can you see why they might say that?

20:49 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
I can see and maybe I can hopefully dispel that.

20:52 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, let’s give that a go.

20:54 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Yeah, you know, I think one of the areas that I have observed the most in the last few years and it really started with the pandemic as an example you know, there’s a lot of things changing, working remotely, return to office and I think what caused a lot of issues and a lot of confusion is two aspects actually.

21:25
One is transparency of why these changes are made and also managers not necessarily understanding the flexibility they have on changing those decisions or supporting their team. And I think that is actually a hard portion, because our gut instinct is, you know, if there is a question we have, it would be great if we could just look up the answer that’s posted somewhere. That’s posted somewhere. But you know, the fact of the matter is we also look at individuals, you know, instead of a large group. As engineering managers, we think very closely about our team and supporting them and caring for them, and I think where a lot of managers need support is understanding what are the constraints, what flexibility do I have here and how can I be supported, and I think that’s actually a larger aspect. So I think it wouldn’t be. Oh, I’m not supported by HR, hr saying it’s difficult working with engineering managers. I actually think there is an opportunity in engineering managers really learning how HR can support them outside of policies, so I think that’s actually a big area for opportunity.

22:41 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And I would absolutely agree with that and I think you know in part it’s because we’ve got this slightly codependent role where we’ve been the nursemaid or the compliance officer, and the leaders and managers that we’re working with have yet to understand what we could help deliver.

23:00
And you know, I see HR’s role has been being around creating the conditions where people can do their best work, and you know whether that be supporting with training or employment policy or career development opportunities and mobility support, you know, if we’re not focusing on that, if we’re still focusing on our role as compliance officer, reinforcing policies and perhaps being the nursemaid in some situations, then then those engineering leaders aren’t seeing what could be done.

23:34
So I absolutely, I absolutely get there and I’ve always kind of felt look, engineers are very smart people. The engineers I’ve worked with they weren’t technical engineers in the sense that they were more kind of manufacturing engineering environments, but they they were really smart people and could totally get that a process might be better to deliver an engineering outcome. But actually human beings need something different and I think sometimes maybe we just need to sort of appeal to the human being behind the engineering facade, which is that you wouldn’t treat your 16 year old daughter the same way you treat your six you know seven year old son. You know you’re you’re very capable of working out differences between human beings.

24:22 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Um people and HR leads, who I really worked well with and what made the difference and the realization I came up with too, is a lot of times the first interaction between an engineering manager and HR is when they need something.

24:50 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah.

24:51 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Um, you know it’s, there’s an issue, there’s a concern, it comes up and that is actually their first interaction with HR and there can be barriers, like it could be an automated system that people have to go through first.

25:05
It could be a general HR pool. But I was remembering one of the great HR leaders I work with, great HR leaders I work with, and this was back in Microsoft and when she joined the company and our organization, I think she was supporting a larger group, maybe 200 or more people, but in her first month she went and met every single engineering manager and so the first interaction was an introduction. It wasn’t a this is what you’re going to do, going forward, or engineers a manager’s asking, hey, I need this. It was really just an introduction and because I had that connection with her, I was more comfortable sharing improvements. I think the organization needed I had more of a say early on and throughout the entire year, as opposed to just when I needed a change, and I think because of that we were able to build an amazing organization with mobility, with work life balance, with care in mind, and I think that was actually a big aspect is the first interaction shouldn’t be a I need this thing now.

26:13 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And partly that’s because ratios have have been, you know, um, increased dramatically so, whereas in days gone by you might have had a relatively sort of small and manageable population of leaders that you could get to know, sometimes ratios are crazy now and there’s absolutely no way that they’re being anything other than firefighters. But you know, and I do get that and some people listening might go, yeah, it’s all very well, but you know I I’ve got 500 managers and but I do take your point. I think that you know, in the end, great HR is about judgment. It’s about relationships. It’s about weighing up and supporting the leader in what it is that they’re trying to do. And how can we get there? You have to have a relationship in the first place to understand that, because you have to understand why are they asking me this? What’s the real issue? Maybe there’s something that is behind what they’re actually asking, and the great HR people that I’ve worked with are very good at doing that, because they’ve invested the time in building a relationship outside of that transaction.

27:19 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Absolutely, and I think the same message goes for experienced engineering leaders. They know how to leverage HR support, they know how to take advantage and really push that forward, how to take advantage and really push that forward, whereas inexperienced managers, they don’t know how HR can help them beyond that single instance transaction.

27:42 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, yeah, kiranbir, that’s been so interesting. Thank you so much for spending the time. That looks like sunshine coming in and hitting the back wall there. Is it sunny where you are?

27:58
It is sunny here in California a little bit colder, but I’m never going to complain about the weather. It’s pitch black here. It’s a half past six on a December evening. It’s been dark for about four hours. It feels like it’s freezing cold, so it’s just been lovely seeing that sunshine bouncing off your back wall there. Thank you so much for spending the time with me, kieran Beer. Some really interesting insights there, and I have to say that I don’t think there’s probably as many great people leaders in engineering as you, but I’m really happy to be proved wrong. Thank you so much for being with us today.

28:35 – Kiranbir Sodhia (Guest)
Thank you for having me.