Lindsey Devlin

The best advice I've received is not to be an enabler. What that means is when you're in the type of position that I'm in, in IT consulting managing many teams, sometimes there will be situations where one of the team players is just not giving me what I need to move forward. Instead of taking on their role and filling the gap, I need to allow that person to figure it out themselves, even if it's a potential risk to the timeline. I guess it's about not being a people pleaser and not enabling the situation, because that doesn't help at the end of the day since I'm just doing double the work. I'm still trying to work through that because it's really hard, especially when things will interfere with my engineer's utilization and schedule if I'm not getting what I need on the customer side. Certain things have to drop for somebody to pick up the ball on their side. It's about staying in my lane and not doing other people's work just to keep things rolling.

I would say go in confident and lean on your people for information. You're not gonna know everything, and you're not expected to. Be kind and try to motivate your team, especially in my position as a leader. A lot of people look up to me, and I feel like if you're kind of down in the dumps and have a very stale personality, your team will follow. But if you're motivating them and you give them incentive to consistently do good and give them recognition, they'll want to succeed and want to work with you and want to help you. Being compassionate, being understanding, going in confident, and leaning on your people for answers is important. You're not meant to know everything. Having empathy is a big part of it, being understanding of everyone's situation, because not everyone's gonna have good days, so patience as well.

I think getting all the cross-functional teams aligned and on the same page is one of the biggest challenges. Communication plays a major role in that. Because there's so many teams involved, they may be moving at a different pace or on a different page as far as their perspective on things. One of the biggest challenges is getting everybody aligned and making sure that they agree upon the plan and the execution steps so that we're all successful. Just making sure everybody's in alignment on the end goal. There's a lot of personalities that I deal with as well, so just trying to diffuse conflict because sometimes there will be conflict and everybody gets stressed throughout their days. It's about navigating the different personalities and different perspectives, making sure that everybody understands the goal clearly and they're aligned on the plan to be successful.

As a woman in tech, I've learned the importance of leading with both confidence and empathy. I've had to advocate for myself, build credibility in a high-pressure environment, and support my teams through complex, fast-moving projects. I definitely take pride in creating structure where there's uncertainty and helping people feel aligned and empowered. When working through challenges, I take a step back and don't overreact on impulse. I try to understand fully end-to-end what everybody's perspective is and then navigate a resolution from there in a calm, patient manner. Being understanding, being patient, and understanding everyone's perspectives is crucial before regrouping and going in with a calm approach to get everybody back on track.