Articles for category: Growth

Measure the Journey

If you are constantly measuring your results by the final result, you’re going to be disappointed 90% of the time. You won’t always come first. You won’t always win gold. You won’t always get the job. But you can learn from it, you can grow from the work you did to get there and you can turn your focus to a greater goal. But if you’re all focused on is the end result, you’ll never appreciate everything you did in the journey to get there.

March 30, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Bumps in the Road

Bumps in the road make us better. Seriously. We learn what to avoid (big monster potholes). How to navigate (dodging big monster potholes). And how to respond when things go wrong (when we hit the big monster potholes). The bumps and lumps we take, the setbacks, the ups, and the downs. They make us better, but only if we let them.

March 21, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Focussed Team

It might seem as though you are being mean when you dissuade conversation or try to bring people back to the focus and purpose of the meeting. It’s even odd that this would be interpreted as mean. A team that goes into a meeting, chat on a topic for an hour with no discernible outcome is the definition of a “meeting that could have been an email.” Set the goal for the meeting, if you find your team drifting, bring them back to the reason they are there, why they are on the call, why you are all talking. There

March 19, 2022

Greg Thomas

Oh the Surveys

I was working on a problem the other day with my Azure tenant.  It wasn’t so much a problem as I was trying to find something – going through menus, searching for services (that the vendor no longer offered) – when I was prompted to fill out a survey and rate my service with Azure. At that point in time – zero. The only use my phone home has these days is to be picked up, have someone try and get me to answer a survey as quickly as they can before I hang up. After speaking with someone for

March 13, 2022

Greg Thomas

Software Leadership Series: The Software Manager Minimum

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 base minimum was that I had to do, I didn’t know where to start. This is why I wrote this –  The Software Manager Minimum