Module summary

Change is the only constant. As a manager, you’re always dealing with changes to short- and long-term plans. But how can you effectively lead a team through change when you yourself don’t have all the answers? First, take a big breath. You can’t know everything, but you can build a roadmap to make yourself and your team, and your processes resilient. And remember, change can bring new opportunities and lead to career growth. In this module, we’ll focus on concrete practices you can use to equip yourself for and thrive through change while creating an environment of trust for your team.

Module 1 takeaways and homework

Congratulations on completing your first module of Nurturing effective engineering teams. In the module ‘Preparing for change’

You learned that:

• Change is the only constant, and your role as a leader is to anticipate change, be aware of the signs to look out for and make plans for how they will react when it happens so you can stay ahead of the curve of changes.
• When you are proactive and “lean into” change, you can limit the negative impact it has on you and, in many cases, parlay it into a benefit.
• As a leader, your job is constantly " sell” change. This could be org strategy shift, prioritizations, reORg. It is to your direct teams and also your partners and bosses.

You discussed as a group how to build resiliency or anti-fragility into your teams by:

• Identifying your team’s weak spots and blind spots
• Analyzing different types of potential changes and seeing how well your team is set up to handle them
• Identifying potential plans and action items you could do to increase the resilience for each of these areas.

You should be able to:

• Get more comfortable dealing with uncertainty by taking more of an active role in handling potential changes
• Build resilience into your personal and team lives and structures
• Communicate change effectively to your teams, your peers, and your managers

Homework

In your group exercise, you played out change scenarios and options you could see unfolding to help you build resiliency in your team.
Some of the scenarios you covered were a change in priority, major systems outage, loss of critical employees, losing your boss, doubling in size quickly, and suddenly working from home (or returning to the office). From this list, select the one change that you think is the most likely to happen.

As a leader, an essential part of handling change is communicating and selling change so you’re not increasing anxiety and bringing clarity to your team. To do so, you want to emphasize the positives, but you should also address the negatives.
Thinking about the scenario you selected, how would you sell that change to your team? To help, note down the negative aspects, how they can positively affect your team and opportunities that might arise from them. Can you also come up with a communication plan?

Additional ressources:

• Give away your legos by Molly Graham to explore how you can capitalize on change
• Antifragile. It's a thought-provoking book about building resilience in your work and personal life.
• Dynamic reTeaming by Heidi Helfand
• Google “Ted talks on embracing Change” - The top results are all great short talks which you can all learn something from