Leadership Principles for Remote Teams (and All) with Jason Warner, CTO @ Github #5

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Jason Warner (@jasoncwarner), CTO @ Github shares management principles fundamental to how he leads remote engineering teams. He shares how to scale leadership by applying the right tools and frameworks for effective communication. Jason also tells us the structures and strategies he applies to build & maintain trust throughout an organization.

“Every leader in an organization should make THE SET of decisions that ONLY they can make. And then delegate all the other ones. And the only way that you can do that is if everyone is empowered to make the right decisions with the right context, and you have invested ahead of time and trained the neural net of the organization to make those appropriate decisions well.” - Jason Warner

ABOUT JASON WARNER

Jason oversees the Office of the CTO, whose mission is to explore the unknown and non-existent aspects of technology and software in order to build a map of GitHub’s future. He oversees over 704 engineers, 85% of whom operate remotely. He was previously Senior VP of Technology at GitHub, where he played an integral role in scaling the Engineering, Product, and Security Teams, and built GitHub’s product roadmap.

He’s been the leader of fully distributed companies for the last 10 years. Prior to GitHub, Jason was VP of Engineering at Heroku. He oversaw Product Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Phone at Canonical.

He’s also a member of the Advisory Board of INNOVATE Ohio - reporting to the Lt. Governor advising policy decisions that impact growth in technology and aim to make Ohio the most INNOVATIVE state in the country in the next 5 years.

RESOURCES

• The Art of Simple Sabotage
  

SHOW NOTES

• Why challenges with trust, communication, and engagement are NOT unique to remote teams. (2:34)
• The differences between building trust in remote and co-located teams. (4:05)
• Why micromanaging is the easiest way to cause breakdowns, destroy productivity and negatively affect morale. (5:40)
• Jason’s biggest fear as a leader and the fundamentals he uses to scale leadership. (9:17)
• Structures for effective communication at different scales. (12:20)
• Early signs of mistrust and how to easily measure the health of an organization(14:39)
• How you can use “organizational canaries” to get unfiltered feedback (19:26)
• How to maintain trust & avoid destroying relationships. (24:14)
• Effective executive communication using the “V-shaped” pathway. (27:17)
• Examples of how to measure gaps in your communication feedback loops. (31:46)
• How to turn concepts of healthy communication into mechanisms in your team. (34:48)
• Signs of bad communication and you can overcome them. (37:10)
• How to train your organization to make better decisions when you’re not in the room (41:17)
• Why you should prioritize tools for asynchronous communication and institutional memory (43:45)
• How you can increase the fidelity of your communication. (46:56)
• Frameworks to think about team engagement. (51:53)
• Why Jason believes the role of in-person communication will diminish over time. (57:54)
• Two actions you can take IMMEDIATELY to improve hiring for your remote team. (1:03:05)
• Back pain as a metaphor for addressing the root issues in your organization. (1:07:36)
• Jason’s greatest joy as an engineering leader. (1:12:35)

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