Episode 28: Leadership skills and energy management with Alice Bartlett
Aug 17, 2024
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Alice Bartlett, a seasoned tech director at the Financial Times, shares her journey from principal engineer to leadership. She emphasizes the importance of strong leadership skills over technical expertise in managerial roles. The discussion explores effective delegation, nurturing future leaders, and the challenges of prioritizing tasks amidst busy schedules. Alice highlights strategies for managing uncertainty and motivating teams under pressure, offering valuable insights for anyone in a leadership position.
Alice Bartlett underscores the vital importance of strong leadership skills over technical expertise for effective management in engineering roles.
She emphasizes the necessity of energy and time management, highlighting the challenges of balancing meetings and team dynamics in leadership.
Deep dives
Leadership Journey and Role Transition
Alice Bartlett shares her career progression from a principal engineer to a tech director at the Financial Times. After spending five years as a principal engineer, she applied for and secured the tech director role, where she now oversees a diverse team of approximately 50 engineers and manages the digital platforms, ft.com and related apps. This transition highlights the importance of leadership development and the need for technical professionals to evolve into managerial roles that require a different skill set. Her journey showcases the necessity for technical proficiency combined with effective team management and strategic oversight.
Team Structure and Management Approach
The organizational structure under Bartlett consists of ten cross-functional delivery teams, each composed of a product manager, tech lead, and engineers. This arrangement fosters collaboration and allows teams to tailor their roles according to the product lifecycle stage, whether focusing on user research or maintenance. Unique to Bartlett's model is the integration of principal engineers into management roles, where they not only oversee technical operations but also provide managerial support to tech leads and their respective teams. The hierarchy ensures clarity in roles while allowing effective resource management within the diverse technical landscape of the Financial Times.
Time Management and Prioritization
Bartlett emphasizes the challenges of time management as a tech director in charge of numerous tasks and personnel. Most of her time is allocated to meetings, including one-on-ones with her principal engineers and group discussions, while she also engages in hiring processes. She highlights the necessity of prioritizing her calendar to accommodate unexpected interventions, thus ensuring she remains accessible and informed on team dynamics. This ongoing balancing act between scheduled obligations and the need for flexibility is crucial for effective leadership in a fast-paced environment.
Key Qualities for Leadership and Management
Bartlett identifies essential qualities necessary for success in leadership roles, such as emotional intelligence, the capacity for difficult conversations, and the ability to delegate effectively. She stresses the importance of being seen as a role model, fostering an environment of psychological safety where team members feel encouraged to communicate openly about performance issues. Additionally, she shares her strategy of nurturing talent from within by assessing senior engineers' readiness for principal engineer roles, focusing on patience, accountability, and the ability to prioritize impactful work. By developing a strong leadership pipeline, Bartlett aims to equip her team to manage change and drive innovation within the organization.
The Financial Times (FT) uniquely combines individual contributor and management responsibilities in senior engineering roles. In this episode, I talk to Tech Director Alice Bartlett about what that’s like for her, how tech skills (at that level) are not necessarily key skills, and how it’s more important to have strong leadership skills, which includes managing your energy (and your calendar!) Listen to this episode for more insights and to hear Alice’s leadership journey in tech.
Guest Biography:
Alice is a tech director at the Financial Times. She oversees the team that builds and maintains FT.com and the apps. She has been at the FT for eight years and managing managers for about 5 years. She lives in Brighton with her family.