When you leave, you finish strong. You bring the end game. You leave no doubt who they are losing and what your potential is. You let them know they had the best and the brightest and they made the wrong trade. This isn’t about showing off or lording it over them. This is about doing what you have always done – driving to the problem, taking the initiative, and leading the way.
As a leader, you need to deliver. You need to get things done and you do that through your team. They are the indirect conduits to your success. You need to engage in motivation, inspiration, mentorship, and coaching. You need to lead the way by jumping in and helping with bugs they don’t need to be doing and leaving the juicy stuff for them to work on. It gets hectic, super hectic – mid-project when…
Leveling up in Video Games is pretty easy. They give you a progress bar, you gain experience, when you hit the next level you’re there – maybe they give you some kind of bonus or tool or trick or something. But you get the idea, it’s a known quantity – you work towards a metric and then boom level up. It doesn’t happen like that in life, because we don’t know where the next level…
The Tangibles are the metrics, the numbers, the data, the things that you can’t argue about – “we delivered on time” or “we were late”. The InTangibles are the gut feelings, the thoughts, the ideas, the context. You can’t measure them. The InTangibles are what people want to hear about because they generally provide the correlation and the context to the Tangibles. But you can’t talk about them until you have presented the tangibles. The…
I wrote this article a few months ago called the “Software Manager Minimum”. It was a quick take on what Managers need to do as their baseline to get buy as leaders for their team. I remember my first month of being a software manager feeling completely overwhelmed – so much was coming at me – releases, performance reviews, yearly objectives, team cohesion, code issues, etc, etc. At the time, I didn’t know what the…