Articles for category: Leadership

March 8, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Whiner

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about what you could call the “Rogues Gallery” of Software Development Teams. We have the Nitpicker, the Backbencher and the Doomsayer but today we are introducing the legend themselves – the Whiner. It’s super easy to know who Whiner is… Whine about the requirements Whine about the codereview Whine about the unit tests Whine about the QA Plan Whine about the deployment taking too long Whine about the servers being too slow We all whine about this, that or the other thing from time to time.  Some days you have absolutely had enough and

March 3, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Open Letter Myth

I love these cycles of Open Letters going round and round – for awhile there is nothing and then we start seeing them all over the place – then they die down again. I think at one point, perhaps when published in a newspaper there was an intent to advocate on behalf of a set of people, but the myth of what it accomplishes has decreased significantly. The myth is – I write this letter, I put out these ideas no one else is thinking, I publicly attack this one person, everyone rallies to me and I become a popular

February 24, 2016

Greg Thomas

How to Scale One

You know the person on your team that knocks it out of the park – all day, every day – they show up, deliver and leave you sitting at your screen thinking – “Wow, amazing, just wow”. And you always ask yourself that one question – “How do I clone this person?”  or in more realistic terms – “How do I scale past one?”  And maybe this is you, running the solo company, making a go of it, you’re killing it in the market, but also killing yourself in the process.   And at some point you realize – I can

February 22, 2016

Greg Thomas

Slingshot Leadership

Slingshots – not the toy, but the event, the idea behind pulling something back slowly, waiting and then releasing at which point the object is propelled at an increasingly fast rate across a distance. Applied to leadership – waiting, holding back, not saying anything, perhaps biding one’s time and then… a Tsunami of advice, direction, guidance, opinions that were never there before but are now. It seems like a good approach but what is missing is the consistency, the daily grind, the touchpoint, the checking in, the seeing how you are doing.  Slingshot Leadership is based on the big events happening

February 19, 2016

Greg Thomas

Waiting to be asked is an Excuse

“But you didn’t ask me about THAT.” To which my answer always is – “Did I ask you how you got here?” No. The best updates in any meeting, on any project are the ones that come voluntarily and don’t wait for the meeting to happen to volunteer them.  They are the ones that provide the most impact and make you think – “huh we probably don’t need that meeting, so let’s cancel it and keep going”. But the meetings where people are only willing to offer up information when asked about a certain subject?  Yeah, those are the ones,

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