Building Resilient Leadership Teams: Lessons from Scaling Engineering Organizations

Thiago Ghisi, an engineering leader who has scaled organizations through multiple growth phases, recently shared his experiences building resilient leadership teams at QCon London. His talk, "Lessons from Growing Engineering Organizations," offers practical insights for engineering managers and senior ICs looking to create effective leadership structures beneath them.

The Epiphany: Leadership Below the Top

A major turning point for Ghisi was realizing that his role wasn't just about being part of the boss's leadership group, but also about intentionally building a leadership group beneath him. This shift in perspective transformed how he approached organizational growth.

"They started with an off-site where managers and senior ICs shared personal struggles, like repeated incidents or scope confusion, and also aligned on priorities and goals for the next cycle as a team in a format similar to a Lean Inception," Ghisi explained. This approach built empathy and trust among team members who would need to work closely together.

Building Trust Through Shared Vulnerability

The off-site wasn't just about strategic alignment—it was about creating psychological safety. When leaders share their struggles openly, it creates a foundation for honest communication and mutual support. This vulnerability-first approach helps break down silos between different teams and creates a sense of shared purpose.

Consistent Syncing and Accountability

To maintain momentum, Ghisi's teams established consistent weekly or biweekly syncs where leaders would hold each other accountable. These weren't just status meetings—they were opportunities to remind each other of the most important priorities and reallocate resources to critical projects, even when that wasn't necessarily the best thing for individual teams.

This willingness to make tough decisions for the greater good of the organization is what separates effective leadership teams from collections of managers. It requires trust that everyone is working toward the same goals and a shared understanding of organizational priorities.

Expectation Calibration: Defining "Good"

One of the most powerful practices Ghisi described was expectation calibration. At the start of each cycle, each manager drafts expectations for their direct reports and gets peer feedback. This ensures everyone agrees on what "good" looks like at each level and that focus areas align with broader organizational and company priorities.

This calibration process serves multiple purposes:

• It creates consistency in how performance is evaluated across the organization
• It surfaces blind spots in how different managers think about performance
• It ensures alignment between team-level goals and company-wide objectives
• It builds a shared mental model of what success looks like

Culture: Walk the Walk, Not Talk the Talk

Ghisi emphasized that culture is less about what you say or what rituals you have and more about what you do and how you react during changes or crises. "Culture is what you do, not what you say," he argued.

This means being someone who is constantly trying to improve, really listening and incorporating suggestions when they make sense, and being willing to have difficult conversations rather than avoiding conflicts. It's about demonstrating the values you want to see in your organization through your actions, especially when things get tough.

Documentation Before Reorganization

One of Ghisi's key pieces of advice was to never try to reorganize without documenting it in writing first. He suggested creating a simple one-pager describing the big reasons, motivations, and goals for the reorganization before starting any brainstorming on potential structural changes.

"Every time I tried to speed things up or just to tell 'the vision' at a high level in repeated meetings and hope that vision would carry over into discussions, I was reminded and surprised by the telephone game with discussions going completely sideways," he shared.

This documentation serves as a north star during the reorganization process and helps prevent misunderstandings and misaligned expectations.

Fixing People Before Pushing Delivery

When dealing with low-performing teams, Ghisi learned to address interpersonal or skill gaps first before pushing for delivery. "A stressed, unsafe team can't deliver at scale," he noted. This people-first approach recognizes that sustainable performance comes from healthy teams, not from forcing output from dysfunctional groups.

The RACI Matrix: Avoiding Gridlock

Not everything needs consensus, and that's a good thing. Ghisi emphasized the importance of establishing who the tie-breaker is if the leadership group is split. Without clear decision-making authority, leadership teams can get stuck in endless debates.

The RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) can help clarify roles and responsibilities, preventing the paralysis that comes from unclear decision rights.

Continuous Improvement Through Experimentation

Ghisi's teams baked "lessons learned" into everything they do—from major incident postmortems to leadership off-sites. This creates a culture where trying something new doesn't mean being stuck with it forever. When they discovered that merging two squads actually caused more on-call load than expected, they fixed it quickly.

This transparency in writing showed they weren't wedded to top-down directives if they weren't working. People learned that experimentation was safe and that the leadership team was always listening and ready to help.

Finding the Right Team Topologies

When it comes to team structures, Ghisi advocates for experimentation based on internal patterns rather than borrowing ideas from other companies. They constantly look for friction signals—like unresolved dependencies or overwhelmed managers—and make small, testable changes.

For instance, if one domain was constantly blocking another, they'd place a staff engineer with deep context in that domain onto the dependent team. Or if they saw two squads with overlapping roadmaps, they'd merge them for a quarter as a "task force."

They labeled these experiments from day one: if they solved the bottleneck, great; if they caused more chaos, they'd revert. This gave teams psychological safety to try new configurations, knowing they'd pivot if the data said it wasn't helping.

The Multiplier Effect

By investing in leadership team coherence with clear scopes and a sense of making their peers their first team, Ghisi's leaders became multipliers of culture and performance. Rather than him being the bottleneck, they were helping each other, giving each other feedback, deciding what to promote and what to push back, and discussing and iterating on visions and strategies for the future.

This multiplier effect is the ultimate goal of building effective leadership teams: creating structures where leaders support and elevate each other, rather than competing or working in isolation. When done right, it creates an organization that can scale beyond what any single leader could manage alone.

The lessons from Ghisi's experience offer a roadmap for engineering leaders looking to build resilient, effective teams beneath them. It's not about having all the answers yourself, but about creating the conditions where your leadership team can thrive and multiply your impact across the organization.