Building a Team - a lesson from ETSY

Photo by Eric Ziegler

As I was reading the blog post from the retired CTO, Kellan Elliot-McCrea, from Etsy, I became interested in more about who he was and what made him so special.  So I did some research and came across this awesome article.

How Etsy grew their number of female engineers by 500 % in one year

Yes, you read that title correct. Etsy grew the number of female engineers by 500% in one year. As part of their efforts, Etsy launched "Etsy Hacker Grants" to provide need-based scholarships to talented women engineers enrolling in Hacker School (a three-month hands-on course designed to teach people how to become better engineers).

As part of their hiring, they setup the parameters for success:

• Be serious but inviting
• look for balance
• optimize for building together
• optimize for data gathering
• normalize within your organization
• conduct your experiment publicly

What I found interesting was that these ideals and principals can be applied to people of all cultures and teams. You can apply this to engineering teams or teams doing operations work. And you can apply these principals to not only hiring and helping others, but you can apply these principals to how you team should and could work together. 

What I also found interesting was their philosphy that a team should either have 0 women on it, or 2+ women on the team. One woman on the team ends up making her a woman engineer vs just being an engineer.

Leaders make mistakes - really

Tree
Photo by Eric Ziegler

3 Common Mistakes GOOD Leaders Make

Everyone makes mistakes. Managers, leaders, school teachers, police officers, clergy, etc. If you were to ask the question, what mistakes do you make, what would you say? In the blog post from "leader chat", they asked coaches and leaders, what mistakes do good leaders make. Based on the responses, they recognized three themes of mistakes. And the interesting part is that these are mistakes that anyone could make, not just a "leader" or not just a "manager".

What are the 3 most common misakes?

• An over-focus on the people aspect and avoiding difficult conversations.
• Trying to solve all of the problems of the people they work with or who work from them.
• Neglecting your own personal growth - if you don't keep on growing you

While these on the surface might appear to be manager specific, they are not. These are great things to avoid if you are a leader or an aspiring leader. If you are not currently a manager but lead others and aspire to manage people, and if you avoid these pitfalls, you will end doing things that will enhance your ability to become the next great leader.

You don't have all the Answers - deal with it

In San Diego
Photo by Eric Ziegler

A friend recently passed along a blog post from Harvard Business Review ( +Harvard Business Review @harvardbiz) along with a note where he said:

"I seem to recall back when I took the ABC role that you said something along the lines of "you don't need to have all of the answers - you just need to know where to go to find them" - this article helps crystallize that advice a bit more for me"

No matter your role, your job is not to know everything. Your job is to help others in a way that provides business value. And to deliver that software, you need to take one step at a time with the goal that you complete each task in the most efficient way possible. Sometimes we make it hard on ourselves, because we hold ourselves accountable to know all of the answers. More often than not, we are most effective when we know what we are good at and what we know and are honest with ourselves when we admit to what we are not good at and what we don't know. 

When you are able to recognize both, the next step is to incorporate others into providing that business value.  So sometimes it takes more than one person to accomplish your goal.

Check out this article leading people when they know more than you do

(btw, you are all leaders in your own right, leading is not about just managing people)