How to Build Influence as an Engineering Leader | Kelly Vaughn

**Kelly Vaughn** (0:00)
We always hear on the leadership side of things, like you don't want to hold back your best engineer because you don't want to lose them.
If this job is no longer suiting them, help them move on so they can thrive in their career again. The last thing you want is an engineer who's just not happy doing their work.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:14)
How do the best software engineering organizations in the world set and track goals?
Linear B worked with more than 3,000 orgs to effectively track their KPIs and set goals. And March 26th and 28th, Linear B's CTO Yashai Berry is hosting a workshop to share those best practices with our fellow engineering leaders. This workshop will delve into the data behind effective goal setting, strategies elite engineering organizations use, successful companies that are using goal setting, plus provide a free how-to guide and reporting slide deck for you to leverage. You can register today at the link in the description. I hope to see you there.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm Conor Bronsdon and today I'm delighted to be joined once again by Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI. Kelly and I promised not to talk too much college sports here, which we were doing right before this call. I think we have some exciting topics to dive into since Kelly, I know you've recently kicked off an engineering leadership course on building influence for engineers. Congratulations.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:15)
Thank you. Yeah, this has been many months in the making, and I finally found the time to finish it, and I just ran the first cohort of the course, and based on the feedback I received, it's a really, really good course, and I could not be happier with how everything went. Outside of things taking slightly longer than I expected to, and I added an additional 30 minutes to each day for extra time, I would not, like the content, nailed it.
So happy.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:43)
Obviously, we can't get all the insights from this course in this kind of conversation, but building influence is such an important topic and not something that everyone thinks about naturally. I know you took these two perspectives, one of the individual engineer, how to approach this, and one of the engineering manager, how to approach this.
What's the overview for how both these categories should be thinking about building influence within their organizations and externally?

**Kelly Vaughn** (2:09)
Yeah, that's a good question. So regardless of whether you hold a managerial role or not in an organization, influence plays out the same way. I believe there are three pillars to building influence, and those are trust, communication, and empowerment. Now, how you take these pillars and really have them play out in your day to day is going to vary based on your role. And it was really cool having such a mixed cohort of experience for the first cohort that I ran for my course. It was about 50-50 ICs, like senior ICs and engineering leaders.
And you could see how they're all working towards that same idea of building influence, but in different ways. So, let's take, for example, the first day we talked about building or identifying gaps in your team and helping to fill those gaps. What we are talking about at the beginning is how to basically categorize each of your team members as a high performer, medium performer, low performer, and then what type of high performer or low performer they are. Because a high performer is going to need a different challenge than a low performer. They're going to need different support than a low performer. And the risks that run from each of these types of team members is going to be different as well. So as an engineering manager, you can use this information to help coach and guide your team. Whereas with lower performers, of course, you might have to manage them out or choose to part ways with them.
What you're going to be doing there is different as a manager versus a senior IC or just an IC in general.
And if you are that individual contributor, if you're identifying gaps in your team, just based on how you work with your peers, you can also mentor them as well and even identify where their strengths lie and where you identify yourself in this categorization and how you can learn from your peers too. Part of the relationship building is knowing who you're talking to and knowing how you two can work together. So whether you're a manager or you're an individual contributor, this plays out the same way.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:12)
And this kind of mapping up the team is a key skill because it identifies opportunities for growth within your team and ways for you to work better with your team as an IC or manager to fill those gaps. What is the mindset or approach that each kind of group of people should be taking as they think through this process?