Articles for category: Leadership

January 21, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Backbencher

The backbencher is a tough one to crack. They sit at the back of the room, hidden behind a notebook or laptop, never looking up. They don’t contribute to solving problems. They don’t offer suggestions for growth and/or improvement. They do, wait, patiently, patiently, when everything has been laid out, to submit their criticism of the idea once fully fleshed out by all those around you.  Depending on the problem set and political climate they might even wait until after the release to utter those oh so fateful words – “I told you so”. They are not to be confused with

January 15, 2016

Greg Thomas

The NitPicker

The NitPicker is a frustrating person to work with, for one debilitating reason – they pour through all of your work, all of your team’s work for the sole purpose of finding something out of place and exposing it. Not to help make it better. Not to improve the customer experience. Not to stabilize a peer’s code. Not to improve relation’s with a partner’s product. Simple to find something that shouldn’t be there and making it known that they found it and that this simply, just simply must be changed before the release date or deadline is hit otherwise everything will go

January 13, 2016

Greg Thomas

Technology Doesn’t Fix Culture

Slack is easy to use, but it won’t fix your communication problems. Skype is a great conferencing platform, but it won’t make you a better speaker at your team meetings. Dropbox can store everything about your organization, but it won’t sort it for you by most important to client. Technology won’t fix your culture and it’s time we all started understanding this.   If anything, technology is an incredible concealer (knowing nothing about make-up, only what this term sounds like) and only serves to cover up the blemishes underneath. Sure you could have a valid problem that could be solved by technology – i.e.,

January 7, 2016

Greg Thomas

What Makes a Great Performance Review?

Performance Reviews are seen as one of those necessary evils that are sometimes seen as the metric by which bonus compensations are best paid out.  I.e., what level of objectives did I meet that made earning this bonus relevant. This is a very tricky scenario because constant changing business conditions can throw the most adaptable performance review plans a curve ball making their content and criteria for compensation irrelevant.  But the fault for performance reviews do not lay solely with an organization (the Reviewer) but can also lay with the person receiving the review as well (the Reviewee).  There are those

January 4, 2016

Greg Thomas

It’s Easy to Lead when things are going well

Of course it’s easy – things are going well – you have the perfect team, the perfect set of projects, you are flush with cash, your customers are happy – you are potentially on cruise control as your team is doing so well and perhaps looking beyond to other opportunities. But when the chips are down… Budgets have been slashed. Too little resources, way too many projects that need to be delivered yesterday. Customers aren’t dissatisfied but they are eager for that next release that is a few months behind. Those are not easy conditions to try to lead through especially

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