The currency of an engineering team is respect, and this has nothing to do with position in the organizational hierarchy: instead, it’s about whether the person speaking knows what they are talking about. Do they make our work easier? Are the things they are asking us to do logical and consistent?

It may not be immediately obvious if someone isn’t respected, because it’s rare for feedback to be given. However, what normally happens is that things just route themselves around them: conversations happen, and they find out afterwards; they don’t get asked for their opinion when the team is deciding how to tackle a problem; they hand their notice in and ask if they can leave a week early and are told “you can go right now, if you like.”

By Default, Your Engineers Are Unimpressed

For consultants, this question of respect is crucial. I’ve been on an engineering team and had outside consultants explain straightforward concepts to me that I already understood – and they explained them incorrectly.

From that point on, my aim was to avoid having to spend time with those consultants, and I resisted the initiatives they launched because I didn’t trust their analysis of the situation.

If engineers have decided someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, it will be extremely hard for that person to influence the engineering team to change the way they do things, even if they are right.

Demonstrating Experience and Expertise

It’s crucial when you engage consultants that you ensure they can demonstrate their expertise and experience in a way that means something to engineering teams.

Start with their public profile. If they wrote a book on a relevant topic, or talk at practitioner-focused conferences, or post on LinkedIn, write a blog, or appear on a podcast, that helps with making an assessment. Look at responses to their work as well.

You can also ask them to meet with key members of your engineering team and ask for feedback afterwards: do you think these consultants could help us with any of our challenges?

Who Can Land the Message Best?

Once you have consultants working with you to solve critical problems, there’s another aspect of respect to consider, which is about who a message should come from.

Sometimes, a consultant can influence people more easily than someone working in the company. Inviting Charity Majors to talk about observability to my engineering teams really helped shift thinking - people would quote her back to me for months afterwards.

Other times, you need to find the right internal person to launch a new initiative or a different way of doing things. Finding those people, the ones people respect, and who are generally desperate to fix the problems they see, can be the difference between a successful engagement and one that leaves everyone unsatisfied.

EPSD’s Core Principle Is Impact

At EPSD, we think it’s great when a message from us will land with your team. If we aren’t the best people to deliver the message, though, we can help you to identify the people in the existing org who your team DOES respect, and get them to deliver the key messages.

If we’ve found the right person, the team will never look back, and in three months’ time no one will remember that EPSD was even involved in the initiative – and that is fine by us (as long as our key stakeholders remember).