Podcast Episode 26 – Leading Upwards

Thank you for joining us for another episode. On this episode, we are talking about our experiences of leading upwards and allowing our teams to lead us. This topic came from our good friend Beth Marshall who sent us the below tweet.

Beth’s tweet

Before diving into the topic, Simon asks the peers what apps or technology has changed the way they all do things. Honourable mentions here for Last.Fm, Timehop, Strava, Apple Watches (Simon has finally got one), and how could we not mention Chris and Russell’s epic Poke war on Facebook.

To start the main discussion, the peers all mention their experiences with reporting into a test leader or wider engineering/technology leaders and the differences between them.

A key theme with this whole episode is ensuring the communication channels with your leaders is open consistently, this builds a positive relationship, trust and accountability in both directions.

Experiences (both positive/negative) with leading upwards are discussed including how they have dealt with micro-management and providing dashboards to help their bosses and other senior stakeholders.

The peers the discuss how they get their teams to lead them, all sharing tips on how to build those relationships and enable them to grow.

We hope you enjoyed this conversation and as always, we would love to hear your thoughts on the topic.


Thank you for listening. Please do get in touch if you would like to know more or would like to give us feedback to help us improve and grow.


Saffron QA is a provider of recruitment and consultancy services, exclusively for the software testing industry.

You can find out more at https://saffronqa.co.uk/  or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/saffron-qa/

We’ve found Ben from Saffron QA to be a great partner who has signed up to the vision and values that we have set out in our Testing Peers charter and we hope that you will take the time to visit and connect with him.

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