How to lead tech professionals and teams

Technology professionals, whether self-taught or highly trained, are in high demand — and not just at marquee tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. Across every industry, scientists, coders, and software engineers have become synonymous with innovation, which has raised their profiles and empowered them to pursue independent work.

With so much riding on their output, tech professionals can develop characteristics that make managing them a challenge at times, said Bruce Cameron, director of the MIT System Architecture Group, in a recent webinar titled “Leading Technical Professionals: Heroes and Heartburn?”

“Many technical professionals have a very tightly held belief that they are inherently more capable at managing complexity and that the regular rules don’t apply to them,” Cameron said.

For example, tech talent can become overconfident and resistant to working as a team player. They can rely too much — or too little — on process, tend to overshare technical details, and can lack strong communication and presentation skills.

Given tech worker’s unique sensibilities and traits, organizations need a finely tuned strategy to maximize their productivity and engagement. “We can and ought to do much better in terms of managing technical teams,” Cameron said. “As a manager, you have to figure out how lead and support people who [may be] different from you.”

Boost productivity to drive business success

Cameron is faculty director of a new MIT Sloan executive education program, Leading Technical Professionals and Teams. The course explores the unique composition of this critical group, with the goal of helping executives and business leaders develop and implement successful talent management strategies.

In his talk, Cameron laid out a basic framework and set of best practices for supporting, managing, and leading this class of professionals to boost productivity, and ultimately, drive business success.

Among his recommendations:

Establish clearly defined roles. There’s been a lot of aggrandizing of the tech hero who is prolific at coding or the sole mastermind of a product. Those accolades have fed a perception that tech professionals do what they want, when they want, in the dogged pursuit of innovation. Organizations need to moderate that take with a more formalized structure that establishes clearly defined roles and evaluation criteria, and specific sets of deliverables. In that way, team members and management are clear on boundaries as well as expectations, Cameron said.

Take a player-coach approach to management. Even the most accomplished coder or software engineer could benefit from some direction. Be sure to pair tech workers with more seasoned talent who can deliver face-to-face coaching on preferred approaches and provide insights on what hasn’t worked well within the constructs of your particular organization.

Provide regular feedback. Despite their bravado, tech workers benefit from, and even enjoy, regular feedback, optimally delivered on a weekly or monthly cadence. It’s important to set goals and discuss how they’re doing on key deliverables and critical skills development. “The annual review is a prescribed corporate process, [but] that should not be the only time you are providing feedback,” Cameron said.

Provide ample resources. This class of professional is hungry for information that promotes learning and growth, whether it’s training materials, upskilling resources, or advisory material on career trajectory. Make sure they have plenty of access to enrichment resources, and, when delivering career guidance, be intentional about sharing what they should or should not be doing to advance.

Don’t confuse task management software with managing talent. Platforms such as Asana or Jira are essential for pushing people to make progress and to provide transparency on projects, but they don’t advance efforts to provide coaching or clarify tasks. “They miss out on the broader idea of ‘Are we here to accomplish a set of granular tasks or here to delight customers or invent the future of energy?’” Cameron said.

Understand what motivates people to do their best work. Leaders must be able to read people to delineate between those who are driven by intrinsic motivation, such as the company mission or a set of personal goals, and those who are compelled by more traditional, extrinsic factors, such as compensation and perks. “How well we actually figure out what makes people tick really differentiates managers, in my experience,” Cameron said. “Some people do well figuring that out and then framing and assigning roles, tasks, and goals that line up against that motivation. That is one of the core skills needed for this environment.”

Make best use of the diversity within the team. Technical professionals come in all shapes and sizes: Some are inherently more technical, whereas others are more organized and structured. A good manager recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of both types of team members, pairing them accordingly to maximize overall productivity and creative output.

Emphasize collaboration, but encourage autonomy. Technical professionals, in particular, need to feel some sense of mastery and a level of ownership over their tasks and goals. An effective manager creates an environment that balances the need for autonomy with the desire to collaborate effectively in a group, with everyone working toward the same goals and amplifying others’ contributions.

Watch the webinar: Leading Technical Professionals — Heroes and Heartburn?