Lessons I've Learned About Leading (#4)

Fourth post in the LILAL series. If this is your first time reading, check the intro post.

It's been several minutes since my last post in this series. Interestingly enough, that post was right before I became lead of the performance testing team at HA. But a lot of time has passed since then and I'm no longer the lead of a performance team. Instead I'm back to being the sole proprietor of performance and work along side a team of functional testers. There is no designated lead among us and everyone is smart enough to do the work that needs to get done without instruction, but I do miss the sense of camaraderie that comes with someone rallying all testers and inspiring objectives beyond the ones engineering drive.

In my twenties, as a minority woman plagued with imposter syndrome, I worked in a lot of top-down organizations and started to believe I needed to have authority to get people to listen to me. This continued until my late twenties when an older white male suggested I read about the art of influencing without authority. This man was the Director of Engineering, so I was confused how he could relate since he was someone with a LOT of authority. I later realized he did a ton of influencing without authority around his non-engineering director cohorts. Unlearning this mindset has been extremely beneficial to my EQ and has actually made me think about power and respect in non-linear ways. When you think about compliance purely because someone has power vs support because someone respects & trusts you, the feelings are very different. 

My current position is the ultimate example of influence without authority, since no one is my direct report and I wasn't tasked to lead anyone besides myself. I constantly wonder if I'm overstepping some unspoken boundary when gathering the test engineers to sync on functional automation and CI pipelines, but no one else steps up to poke the process when I stay silent and it's almost impossible for me sit back if I know something could be better. This leads me to my fourth lesson about leading:

The best leaders don't need authority to influence.

This concept is particularly attractive to me as an INTJ, because I don't necessarily want to be in the spotlight nor seek to be in charge. I just can't stand lack of leadership and process so naturally start forming some even if no one else does.

I still have a lot of personal work to do on this skill, but it's one I often drop back to when it feels like I'm being ignored.