Empowering Tech teams: my experience leading in Devops

My name is Karl Johan Grahn, I have worked at Sinch in DevOps since Nov 2020. My research areas include decision making, team efficiency and psychological empowerment.

When I was young, I played with Lego and spent countless hours disassembling electronics and putting them together again. That love for understanding how things work and eagerness for knowledge made it very easy for me to choose my career path as a computer science engineer. This childhood joy is also something that is important to keep, I don’t see work as work, but rather as play.

That is because at Sinch I am process team lead in the DevOps team. The goal of our team is to empower developers to reach production as efficient as possible, and my motivation is to improve the world through engineering and management.

Before COVID, I used to bike to work every day, and sometimes passed the Sinch office when it was in Lund and the company was called CLX. It had presence at a student job fair, and I was able to get contact info for two directors who I later met in person. I got a good first impression, but it took another two years though before I re-initiated contact with them. We talked and I was invited to meet the DevOps manager.

There were some things that left a lasting mark on me and made me join Sinch. First, the talk with my manager was super interesting and gave an open and transparent impression of what would be like to work with him. He also shared with me many details about his own background, and learnings along the way, what grew trust in him.

However, after been given an offer, I was still hesitant about joining due to being unsure about the growth potential in this role. My manager took time to meet with me in person and gave concrete examples how other colleagues had advanced in the organization. Sinch reaches every phone on the planet, so imagine the scale, the opportunity and the growth that offers. And finally, I was encouraged that I would be listened to.

For me, to feel psychologically empowered is a super important part of my job, and that happens when I feel listened to, someone understands my ambitions and supports my professional dreams. — and I found all of these at Sinch. Having enough space for being who you are is key to self-empowerment. It starts with you, as you need to be confident, believe in your capabilities and have inner motivation in life. Then, you need two things: someone who listens and supports you, and the existence of an opportunity. Early on, I made it clear to my manager that I wanted to grow by leading people. I was listened to and got support for supervising master thesis students, leading the SRE initiative and getting ownership for processes in the DevOps team.

A powerful leader empowers team members by listening to them and trusting their capabilities, having transparency in information by being open minded and encouraging self-leadership by challenging them to step out of their comfort zone. Like the team of commandos from the first “Predator” movie — every individual is fully autonomous but at the same time dependent on each other to accomplish something greater than what they could have ever accomplished individually.

Organizational empowerment happens when you give individuals great technical freedom under responsibility. This is a core tenet of DevOps and SRE and what we work towards every day.

And I’m glad to find Sinch as a place where you can dream even bigger than ever, explore your career options, face fascinating challenges, and solve them while building your skills alongside amazing experts.