“It works as long as you’re the smartest, but then the curtain comes back. Nobody likes being manipulated.”
People hate that word, “manipulation.” As a rule, they don’t hate the concept unless they’re on the receiving end of it, and even then sometimes they appear to prefer it to dealing with…well, reality.
(FYI, we’re using affiliate links to Amazon in this post!)
Technology innovation is vital. It can enable business success – and it can also drive business innovation.
If a business falls behind the technology curve, it opens itself up to the risk of under-serving its customers, and eventually being out-maneuvered and defeated in the marketplace. This happens over and over to businesses, where a competitor’s technological innovation pushes them right out of existence – see Blockbuster (Netflix), and Border’s (Amazon, B&N). Amazon has also innovated while JC Penney has stagnated – department stores could have taken the world by storm via the internet – but their online presences weren’t good, certainly not as good as their competitors, and therefore neither were their sales figures.
One of the greatest things about being a leader, for us, is building deep, enduring relationships with the people and teams we work with.
One of the hardest things, for us, about being a leader is leaving the relationships we’ve built. This is a sad, painful process. We love people a lot, and we keep leaving, maybe because there are always more dragons to teach people how to slay.
We’ve seen a lot of tool transitions across a large enterprise, and one of the coolest examples was changing the opinion of the company we worked for regarding source code analysis. We had a tool that was under-licensed, slow, ineffective, and largely ignored. At best, it was a check box labeled “we’re definitely secure, you guys!” that everyone on the ground ignored.
If you’re a Java developer who’s been working with OpenShift 3.x for a while, odds are very high you’ve worked with their OpenJDK 8 S2I image.
That container includes Red Hat’s S2I magic, which can take a git URL or a JAR and turn it into a running Java application. Combined with Spring Boot, it’s a fantastic way to get running Java containers in minutes.
There is freedom and peace and pride in being truly good at something.
Not to seem good.
Not to check off the boxes of good.
But to actually be good.
Everyone should have the freedom to be actually good.
Establishing governance philosophy in an enterprise is a tricky combination of “how much do we trust our people?” and “okay, but how much do we actually trust our people?” The fact is, people are going to screw up. Some of them might deliberately try to screw something up, but mostly they’ll just make mistakes. If the organization can’t handle mistakes, that’s a problem with the adaptability and flexibility of the organization, not with its people. This means that people’s potential mistakes are not a reason to default to not trusting them.
As leaders, our job is to enable the people we lead to make good decisions. The primary way that we can do that is to give them the clarity they need to make those decisions.
If we don’t give our people the information they may need to make the best decision for them, we have failed them as leaders.
One of the first steps a technical leader takes is taking over as a team lead. In IT, this is often called a Dev Lead, Tech Lead, or Architect, depending on a company’s teams and title structure, or it can be more understood than titled.
This type of technical leader might not have direct reports, but accepting ownership of the team’s technical success is leadership, and it’s one of the first big responsibility changes and perspective shifts in the process of becoming a technical leader.
Technical leadership means taking on ownership of a team’s technical success.
In the two-part series Technical Leadership Progression, we defined “technical leadership” differently – if you’ve read that one, here we’re using it to mean specifically the Single Team Ownership phase.
One of the things we’ve noticed while mentoring is that some people suddenly take off like a rocket – they accept responsibility for more than they previously took on, and then they seek out more. They also handle this increase in responsibility very well, and they impress people who previously were at best neutral – along with people who were previously disappointed.
We’ve seen it happen, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to describe what the pieces are, because if a cool thing happens, you should explain how to reproduce it.
So, we began to think of it in terms of the process, the ingredients, and the result.
If a cool thing happens, you should try to figure out how to reproduce it.