Month: October 2020

October 7, 2020

Greg Thomas

Owning a Problem

The easiest way to becoming a leader in whatever field you are in is a simple one. You don’t need a promotion. You don’t need a title. You don’t need to wait for someone to tell you it’s your turn. All you need is a problem and a problem that you are willing to solve and own. When you own a problem, when people see you starting to take responsibility for a problem their view on you changes. You go from being someone who works on “things” to someone who can “own” things, can push them through, can figure out

October 6, 2020

Greg Thomas

What’s my Purpose?

This is the question we are definitely not asking enough of ourselves today. Which of course then begets the follow-ups… Where am I headed? How am I planning to get there? Am I on track? Do I need help? Where should I focus my energies? What do you I need to learn? Where do I need to learn it? But all these questions, they all start with that first question, that only you can answer. What is my purpose?

October 5, 2020

Greg Thomas

Stop Pushing Things Out

When you had a problem in the office, you’d walk by that person’s desk, sit down, have a chat with them and get the problem resolved. If the issue was raised in the morning (i.e., a delayed project), you’d schedule something for early afternoon to sit down and figure things out. If you passed them in the hall you might stop, have a quick 5 min chat and get things resolved. All of these involved physical cues from working on-site with your team, side-by-side, elbow to elbow – crammed into cubicles that were too small (and we all complained about).

October 4, 2020

Greg Thomas

Priority and Severity

Ask any developer how you sort bugs and they might reply P1/S1 or S1/P1. Priority – the impact to the owner’s of the software Severity – the technical impact to the software Both are critical factors in identifying how bugs are logged. Lately, I’ve taken to updating these definitions to apply to other areas of a project that I might be working on. Priority – impact to the owner Severity – impact to the system that we are working on When we talk about the system it could be the process, the software, the team, whatever, but the question remains

October 3, 2020

Greg Thomas

Authentic Leadership

If you want to be having those hard conversations with your team – switching roles, letting people go, moving on to different careers, etc, etc – and you want to generate a response that the team can work with and move the ball forward, you won’t be able to do it without having generated a certain level of trust and authenticity before that first discussion. Otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of people on video, nodding their heads simply to get to the end of the call. You can have authentic, deep discussions that don’t happen on video. We’ve

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