Empower your team with the right type of autonomy 🚀 as we define the balance in this CTO podcast with Andy Walker, who has years of experience leadings teams at Skyscanner and Google. After 30 years in tech, Andy finally has the time to share what his hard won insights about tech leadership. You will enjoy his nuanced approach to autonomous teams, team size and work-life balance.

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BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius and codecentric

Andy has over 30 years experience as a software engineer, leader and coach. A ten year veteran of Google where he worked on Maps, Search and Ads and previously at Netscape and Sony. Recently he’s been focused on how to create an environment for teams to do their best work and coaching leaders to enable this. He’s currently writing about the lessons he has learned about working with people and doing ad hoc coaching and the occasional conference talk.

TIMESTAMPS (approx)

And when we're talking about autonomy within companies, you should understand that you're trying to give every person the most autonomy they can handle at a given point in time ….. And so what you're looking at saying is how much autonomy can you handle right now? And how do we put you in a situation where the bits where you don't have autonomy over what you're learning from so that your ability to tackle larger and more difficult things grows over time? And what tends to happen with autonomy as we don't have that conversation? So when somebody feels that they don't have appropriate decision-making power, they turn around and say, ‘You're not giving me autonomy ‘like it's necessarily a bad thing rather than the better conversation of ‘what level autonomy should you have at this point and how can we help you grow that level of autonomy’” - Andy Walker,alphalist CTO podcast #91

One of my rules of thumb as to whether I'm functioning as a leader was,” How many decisions do I have to make?” And my goal is to never have to make a single decision. This is a futile goal, because that's never going to happen. But it makes me think about how do I push the decision to the lowest part of the hierarchy as possible, so that the people closest to the work are able to have agency over what they're doing. And this should be business as usual. And in fact, if you're working on something, and you're responsible for getting it done, you should have decision-making power over 99 percent of the things in front of you. The interesting case is the edge case for that 1 percent where what you're working on may be mutually exclusive to another team. ” - Andy Walker,alphalist CTO podcast #91

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The codecentric Culture and Career Podcast is unique for a company podcast. It is just employees talking freely about their daily life - from IT consulting projects they are working to imposter syndrome. We support this because we think it's pretty cool that codecentric simply lets the colleagues talk about everything, no matter what it's about - project business, Imposter sydrome, further education or parental leave in the consulting business. For us it is definitely worth a recommendation. Listen in - the codecentric Culture and Career Podcast. Note - its in German.