Articles for category: Leadership

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

December 31, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Meeting Before the Meeting

Have you ever attended one of these?  Not knowing what you were getting into until the end of the meeting where you thought everything had been discussed, ready to go but then only to be informed that now everyone was all prepped, on point, had the same message for the real meeting? Did you then sit through the “real meeting” wondering why you were there, expect maybe for the proverbial show of team unity, wondering what code you could have eeked out in that total combined time block of 2 hours? Getting your entire team into a room for a

December 30, 2015

Greg Thomas

Letting People Fail

I’ve written about Failure a number of times – The True Cost of Failure and Insulating the Failure – and let’s be honest, so have many, many, many other people. Some of my most spectacular failures were not the ones where I was up late at night coding by brains away trying to figure out some new problemset or use some new language – “Okay, so that’s what happens when you take up all the memory”.  No they were the ones where mine, the team, maybe the company’s back was up against the wall and I had to figure out things on

December 24, 2015

Greg Thomas

Understanding the One on One

In any training there is always that one amazing point that you take from it that blows your mind… Why have I not been doing this for years? It was right in front of me all along. That makes total and complete sense. For me, this was years ago when I had just become a Software Manager and the suggestion that I have One on One meetings with my team every month to see how things were going. Shocking… But there it was, the replacement for quarterly reviews that would across as a surprise, the time to have each member of

December 21, 2015

Greg Thomas

Would vs Will

I love it when someone says “I will do this” – that word “will” – it say so much about what someone is going to do; They have passion and fortitude to get something done. They are making a promise to finish something. They have committed to make this “thing” a reality. They have taken on the ownership to make this happen. When I hear someone say that word, you can immediately look up to them and see that fire burning in their eyes – no further discussion is needed – it’s great. Where does would come in? Would originates

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