If I can, I will take the long road back after a customer trip. The whole, hassle to get there, rush, rush with barely a moment to catch our breaths does nothing for me. I don’t get to think about the customer visits that just took place. I don’t get to think about what comes next and how we should attack it. I don’t get to focus on what needs to be done and what…
I hear this too often. What about me? How’s that fair to me? What should I do? Help me? Not, How do we make this work for everyone? Is that fair for all of us? What should we do about this? How can we help each other? I’m probably not the only one. When I wrote down those first four questions I felt my shoulders sink as I wrote it. It’s about me, me and…
I once interviewed someone where I asked that oh so amazing question – “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” (I had not interviewed enough people at that point in my career to realize that this was a dumb question and held no value to the answer being returned). On this particular day, the candidate in question said – “I want your job”. They didn’t know what to say, they probably read it on…
Stay on the current path, assume no risk, never grow, but always be safe. Or take the hit. Forgo the billing for two weeks to work on that new idea. Take a leap into a different job category to learn more about an emerging technology. Volunteer to learn something new. Take less vacation. Whatever it is, take the hit. We grow through taking hits, by trying something new, by taking the hard path, by getting…
One of the most critical components to feedback is timeliness. You wouldn’t wait two months until after a project has been completed to say to a developer – “the problem is how you coded it, you should have done it this way and used this library, I saw that issue immediately” – that provides no value. It might help them the next time they undertake a similar project, but for when it was needed, the…