Technical Leadership: Beyond Problem Solving w/ Pat Kua

**Dan** (0:01)
The skills you need as a software engineer, and the skills you need as a technical team leader are not the same. Instead of building features and solving problems, your position requires the ability to identify multipliers and learn how to say no when you want to say yes.
This week on Dev Interrupted, I brought in Pat Kua, a former CTO turned engineering leadership coach and speaker to walk us through how to overcome some of the unique challenges the engineers face when taking on a leadership role.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
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**Dan** (0:49)
Pat, thanks so much for joining today.

**Pat Kua** (0:52)
Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast.

**Dan** (0:55)
I am super excited to have you on the pod today because I think your mission around helping engineering leaders is so important and needed.
And to just jump right into it, we're going to be talking about engineering leadership and some of the realities that come along with it. So Pat, as a technical leadership coach, you're talking to people all over the world about this. What do you think is the most common misconception people have had about being an engineering leader?

**Pat Kua** (1:31)
Yeah, there's a lot of them. But I think probably the most common one is, when engineers step into their first time engineering leadership role, they think it's more of the same of what they were doing before.
So as an engineer, you want to tackle complex problems. You like that sort of thrill of solving technical challenges. And you think as an engineering leader, that plays a majority of your role. And that's probably the biggest misconception is that, I often explain it's kind of a sidestep rather than a new role up, because you're actually going to be relying on very different skills that you may or may not have had an opportunity to experience.
When you are an engineering leader, you're certainly leading a team of other engineers, all of them bright, smart, learning, and they know how to solve problems. They often don't need as much direction as you think that they might need when it's that sort of first time. And so that sort of temptation to want to problem solve it yourself, is kind of like the engineering mindset, but it's also sort of stripping other people of an opportunity to grow. And it's not necessarily the best and most wanted behavior from an effective engineering leader. So it's really about that, you know, shift in mindset of thinking that it's a very different role, not simply more of the same activity.

**Dan** (2:57)
And I can totally relate to that. I kind of call it like a Superman syndrome or something like that.
And I wrote about this, you know, my experience in the blog, but when I first got promoted, you know, from an individual contributor to a dev team leader, of course, there's other promotions. You might think a bit a little bit differently if you're like a VP of engineering, but, you know, a technical team leader.
I thought I was like being promoted because I was a super engineer. It's like I have, I can solve all the problems. I can do it hands on. I know all the area of the system. I'm a super engineer.
And unfortunately, it was a bumpy ride for me. And even more so, I was a little bit younger and I had senior people on my team that are kind of like, whoa, like back off. Like, I'm good, I'm good here. We need help in these other areas, but I'm good. And so, you know, that I had, you know, I didn't have that, I guess, mentor that tell me, hey, these are the skills that you're actually gonna need to have. One of the things that I always tried to do is in the area that I had a weakness. So for example, you know, in architecture, make sure I have someone within my organization or more of my team or my next hire, that is great at that, that kind of complement my skill set. Have you seen that kind of strategy work?

**Pat Kua** (4:20)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think actually it's a good self-awareness because I think A, you recognize, you know, where your strong points are, but also where your gaps are. And, you know, it sounds like you've definitely, you know, got that self-awareness, which, you know, is one of those things that a lot of first-time tech leaders don't even realize, right? It's the whole, I didn't even know that that was important. And, you know, they're so focused on themselves, they don't realize they can work with people who have that skill set that maybe that they don't really have.