Be Good 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
In Technical Leadership, part 1, we talked about how someone grows into a technical leader aware of their team. In this post, we’ll continue on to describing a Tech Lead who takes ownership of their teams’ success, and then moves into the higher levels.
We like patterns. Patterns are cool. Patterns apply to people, and groups, and organizations, and…everything, actually. (L: I could talk about patterns for hours, but I won’t. You’re welcome.) As we’ve each mentored people into technical leadership and tried to understand how people grow as their leadership role and ability grows, we noticed a pattern with several distinct …
The definition of reliability for the purposes of this post: other people believing that you (or your team) will: do what you say you’ll do, and do what they expect you to do. Reliability is other people believing that you will do what you say you will do and also what they expect you to …
You think you have control. You look around and take stock of your life, and, if it’s a good day, you high-five yourself and feel some measure of peace at how well you’re doing with…stuff. And also things. “My stuff and also my things are right on track!” you say to yourself, proud and pleased. …
Accountability and responsibility sound like the same thing. They definitely represent the same concept – ownership. “This thing is mine.” “I got this.” “I want this to be successful so hard that I will make sure it succeeds.” In fact, the concepts of accountability and responsibility are very close. There’s one main difference, though: Accountability is ownership …
Being a person is hard. This is just science. The only way it’s easy is if: a) you’re lying to yourself, or b) you aren’t paying a lot of attention to yourself or the world around you. People are broken, but we also have God in us, and the conflict between Team Damaged and Team Divine means …