Leadership Unit Tests
Something every manager notices pretty early on in the role is just how different the feedback loop is. It is slow, and it is vague. When you have a meeting or change a process or hire a new employee, it’s hard to tell if you did a good job or not. The consequences might not show up until months later, and even then you might never know for sure how much your actions led to that outcome.
Particularly for managers coming from software engineering, it’s a shock. As engineers, we got unambiguous feedback constantly. Write code. Run code. Even without modern tooling we can see the results of our good work. With the advent of type checkers and linters and automated testing, the feedback loops shortened. We didn’t even need to run the code ourselves to see results. Every little bit of good code we wrote, affirmed a thousand times over:✔️
The good news is that the slow, vague feedback loops for managers (and non-manager leaders) don’t have to be that bad. While software engineers were inventing new tools and techniques to improve feedback loops for code, leaders were doing the same thing for their work with people. That is how we got leadership’s version of unit testing: the one-on-one meeting.
Don’t believe me? Let’s go through the list of benefits that unit tests provide:
