No one grows, no one gets better, no one learns. Whether you’re in school, attending a conference, sitting at the back in a meeting – the questions are what generate the value. Content might be king, storytelling might be the delivery model but questions are the value in any discussion. Feel like you have a stupid question? Good, ignore the chatter, the smirks and ask it. At the end of the day, you made the…

I’ve struggled with this topic for awhile – how to quantify when someone leaves your team or company – what is the impact to you, to start all over again, even with the best of best hires. NOTE: THIS IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC OR PROVEN FORMULA. The biggest hurdle is always the investment through training, domain knowledge and overall cohesion with the team.  Measuring your external training investment is easy, but measuring internal training, knowledge transfer,…

Whether you are a developer becoming a Team Lead, an Architect becoming a Team Lead or you’ve been hired as a Team Lead, the skills you need are always the same. Learn the People – you might know everyone’s work, but you don’t know their style, take a moment, breathe it in and figure out a strategy for how you are going to work with everyone. Know the Technology – Team leads are generally closer…

Quick Win – you make decisions today based on what you want to achieve today based on the mistakes you made yesterday.  Your focus is narrow and you’re looking at the impact as it affects you today.  Quick Wins involve sacrifices and shortcuts on their path to success. Long Run – you make decisions today, for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, but your focus is significantly expanded to include the impact from today as…

There comes a time when you are writing a document and you question whether anyone will read it.  You spend hours putting it together and part way through you start asking yourself this question.  This is a document that you send out to a large group of people that you are not sure if they will look at it or delete it as quickly as it enters their inbox. So you have two options; Stop.…