Articles for category: Leadership

September 30, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Real Cost of losing a Team Member

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, etc over the course of their employment with you is very difficult. Until now. The variables X is the amount that you invest in this resource

September 28, 2016

Greg Thomas

What you need to be a Great Team Lead

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 to technology problems than their managers, often doing active coding while working with the team side-by-side.  Your learning doesn’t stop here, it’s just getting started,

September 20, 2016

Greg Thomas

Quick Wins and Long Runs

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 you look forward.  The Long run eschews shortcuts and “we’ll fix it later” in favour of thought out plans. One solves today’s problem, the other

August 31, 2016

Greg Thomas

If you read this far…

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. If you read this far… Stop Yes you can stop working on this document and simply make a case for it’s irrelevance.  That might work,

August 24, 2016

Greg Thomas

How fast can you really go?

While recently on a very long road trip, I spent a lot of time staring at my odometer to make sure I was going within the proper speed limits on our journey.  During this time, I kept noticing how I’d be going 100 (ish) km but the odometer could go to 240km. With everything loaded up in the vehicle, could I really go that fast? With nothing in the vehicle, could I really go that fast? Will I ever be able to that fast? So – at this point, I have a flashing sign saying “YOU CAN GO THIS FAST” constantly

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