One of the hardest shifts for developers stepping into technical leadership roles is dealing with uncertainty. Developers are used to a high degree of certainty in their day. Examples include a test passing or not passing, a build working or not working, a deployment successful or not successful. Most teams using some sort of Kanban/XP/Scrum have some sort of team structure in place (clarity on planned work, work in progress, and completed work). There are of course lots of uncertainty developers face like finding out if they built what stakeholders/customers need, is the design simple and understandable enough, or debugging some weird bug.
Stepping into leadership roles means dealing with higher degrees of uncertainty. The greater your scope, the greater levels of uncertainty. No one will typically tell you where to prioritise your time. You’re simply expected to organise your work for yourself, which often means saying no, or at least, “No, not now”. You have higher degrees of uncertainty, especially dealing with people’s emotions and reactions to events. You might think someone will react how you would to a certain event. Instead, be prepared for a wide range of responses. An announcement of an organisation change might raise anger in some, resentment in others and might even excite other team members and offer a hopeful future. Lots of uncertainty.
How can you handle uncertainty?
One useful exercise I introduce to first-time leaders is visualising the future. Project yourself in the future and imagine the possible alternative paths. Reflect on what you might do or say in response to them. Although you can’t predict all of the possible alternatives, at least you can prepare for those you can imagine. Where you have extreme levels of uncertainty (the “I have no clue” situation), spend time gathering more information and data to understand what options you may have.
Your challenge for this week is to bring your attention to the uncertainty around you. Visualise the future and reflect on what you can do to craft more certainty from uncertainty?