Talking shop with IT managers: how are people led today?

What do today’s IT managers do? Where constitutes good leadership in this day and age? Is the traditional stick and carrot approach still valid, or have we finally managed to get rid of hierarchies? What about the much-touted remote management – is it a threat or a threat or a ginormous threat?

We at Rakettitiede are lucky to work with great clients whose amazing supervisors are happy to give answers to the questions above. We chatted with Riku Tervonen and Mikko Hiltunen from Suunto, Antti Hermunen, a former long-time manager at F-Secure, Jani Kieliniva from Apetit and John Liljelund from Vaisala and asked them to share their views on being a leader.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Learning remote management through trial and error

Remote management can’t really be ignored when it comes to modern-day leadership. Since early 2020, IT industry leaders have also had to learn to manage projects, employees and management practices the hard way, be it from home or the summer cottage.

Learning to communicate within the organisation is one of the biggest challenges in remote management. Although we have tools such as Slack, Teams and Zoom, the lack of physical contact means that a lot of questions can easily go unanswered.

“Paying attention to the amount of communication is absolutely essential in remote management. Communication must engage everyone involved. But it’s a balancing act. The communication should be neither excessive and insufficient. The level of communication should be optimised in such a way that people don’t get flooded with messages but still know the score and what’s going on,” says Jani Kielenniva, IT manager at Apetit.

Communication doesn’t mean endless talk about assignments or making progress. In normal circumstances, the supervisors create a coherent overall picture through observing body language, being attentive to what’s going on at the office and listening to water cooler conversations. All this helps to achieve the desired outcome.

If you want to put a positive spin on the whole Wuhan bat debacle, the pandemic has provided many software developers with the opportunity to telework: working from peaceful confines of the home has been more efficient and therefore more satisfying. In terms of leadership, however, the opposite holds true.

“Since all the tacit information that comes from having people in one place has been missing, getting the big picture has been a real pain. However, I wouldn’t wish for any more meetings where you go through status updates and stuff. Perhaps concentrating on tools that would help getting a better overall image could help,” says Mikko Hiltunen from Suunto.

“In addition to having dailies, the only way to get the big picture is to constantly keep track of the workspace in written form. In my experience, that’s the biggest source of problems at the moment. So much information goes to waste and never gets expressed. Maintaining the big picture is a lot harder now,” Hiltunen continues.

Being a manager means being in a service profession

Rakettitiede drops a bomb: authoritarian leadership is OUT, human-centred leadership is IN! Apologies for causing a scandal. It wasn’t our intention to shock you.

Jokes aside, though. When it comes to management methods and practices, the hierarchical approach is finally being put in the back burner and replaced by a healthy culture emphasising team effort. And that’s a good thing.

“The pandemic has helped in finally putting an end to a culture where developers were merely given the specifications and then told to work their magic. That kind of approach is hopelessly outdated,” says Antti Hermunen, who left his managerial position at F-Secure just last autumn.

“Product development has previously applied the waterfall model: A group of coders downstairs gets something to do from somewhere higher up. Then, after six months someone checks up on them to see the final result,” Riku Tervonen from Suunto’s product development continues.

According to Tervonen, today management is first and foremost responsible for the organisation’s vision and strategy and enabling the work in general. In other words, management ensures that the right people are doing things with the right tools. The developers themselves are nearing the client. When it comes to practicalities, decisions will be made at the lowest possible level.

“Coders are not given a ready-made list, but things are agreed within the team. The group communicates and works together with the non-engineering department and then uses agile methods to build the solutions that the client needs. The leaders need to enable all this.”

“In a sense, being a manager is being in a service profession. You have to make sure the team is able to do the tasks they’re assigned and that they also have time to recover from them. The manager must be able to provide the best possible conditions for success,” says Jani Kieliniva from Apetit.

Exhaustion is kryptonite for developer creativity

How does human-centred leadership translate into practice? Especially now that you can’t express your humane side by making sure there’s a bun for everyone in the staff room. Well, I guess you can, but it doesn’t make sense since there’s no one there to eat the buns.

“We have allocated timeslots for training and self-improvement in the developers’ calendars. The situation is monitored to make sure the timeslots are also used. The slots are incorporated into the working day since we care about our developers’ coping and want to offer them variety,” John Liljelund from Vaisala exemplifies.

The industry still needs to develop its practices when it comes to coping at work. Taking care of coping is the cornerstone of human-centred leadership. The pandemic certainly hasn’t made human-centred leadership – or coping – any easier.

“At least in IT, the coronavirus pandemic has made the work more intense in a way. Which is not saying that working was a breeze before the pandemic, either. We’ve started using different tools more, which may have amped up the intensity,” Liljelund says.

“The intensity of work is also related to the degree of automation. This means that more creativity is required of the developers. That’s something the machines won’t be able to replace any time soon. Exhaustion kills creativity. If you aren’t able to recover, you won’t be able to be creative either.”

Coping at work is a topic that deserves more attention than we’re able to give it here. That’s why we wrote about it elsewhere. We can continue the discussion HERE!

This year, Rakettitiede celebrates its 10th anniversary while keeping a keen eye on the future. We want to keep boosting our clients’ demanding software development projects in the decades to come, so we teamed up with the Finnish Central Association for Mental Health to see what we could do to improve well-being in the industry. We decided to start a countdown to a more mental health positive tomorrow and embarked on a journey to find ways to develop organisational cultures and promote employee well-being.