Last week, I co-led back-to-back workshops on engineering leadership.

The first was with my good friend and product manager Diana Berlin for the engineering managers at Quip. The other was with another good friend and engineering-manager-turned-coach Jean Hsu for engineering leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area – people who ranged from senior individual contributors to tech leads to managers to VPs.

Both workshops focused on the powerful conversations that we can have as engineering leaders to discover and share what’s important, build trust, and take responsibility for the impact we have on the world around us.

A year ago, if you told me that I’d be creating and leading workshops around engineering leadership, I would have looked at you in disbelief. Me? In front of a room leading a workshop? You have to be kidding.

Now, they are experiences that are fun and exciting to create and lead. Morever, I also feel a strong calling to create and bring more of these workshop experiences into the tech industry, because they are needed more than ever.

For the past four and a half years, I’ve written a lot about leverage, both on my blog and in my book The Effective Engineer. It’s a powerful framework for measuring and guiding the impact that we as engineers create in the world.

And engineering leaders today have so much leverage and influence over the world — web and mobile technology enable us to build products that radically transform people’s lives in a short period of time. Facebook doubled its user base from 1 to 2 billion people in under 5 years. Uber grew its revenue to $6.5 billion in just 8 years.

And yet, in our haste to grow, grow, grow, there is an increasing danger that working in technology actually creates distance rather than brings people together.

We lose sight that a user is actually a person with a story and a life that we are shaping. I’ve worked on user growth and engagement for much of the past five years, and I often need to remind myself that there are real people behind the numbers and the graphs that move up and to the right.

We forget that the co-workers and teammates we get frustrated with at work are people too, who have their own needs and insecurities. In the past year, I’ve had co-workers who exploded at me in meetings, who shot down my ideas in public because of misunderstandings, who felt intense pressure and tension because our goals weren’t aligned. And, in each case, we recovered – with an even stronger relationship than before – by having hard conversations and remembering that we’re all humans on the same team, with good intentions.

If we’re not armed with the skills to have conversations around what’s important and to discover and be aware of our impact, we won’t be able to take responsibility for that impact.

And that’s why I’m so excited to be spending more time on raising the bar for engineering leadership next year. I’ll be taking the most valuable lessons that I’ve learned from the past year — from my year-long coach training and leadership development programs with the Coaches Training Institute and from coaching upwards of 50 people ranging from tech leads and managers to directors and CTOs — and sharing them with all of you.

I loved this tweet that one of the participants, Elizabeth Ford, shared after the workshop. It’s a reminder of the level of impact that I’m planning to create in the world:

“I just got out of a truly transformational workshop on communication / leadership by @jyhsu and @edmondlau. If you ever talk to other humans in your work, you probably need this workshop!”

We sold out tickets for this workshop only a week after we announced it. And just this week, Jean and I finished an afternoon of BIG DREAMING (yes, the dreams were BIG), where we dreamt up many exciting things we want to create for you next year. So if you’re committed to leveling up your own leadership and don’t want to miss out on opportunities, get early-bird access when new workshops launch.

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Break free of your own limiting beliefs, take control of your own story, and develop the authentic leader within you.

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