Articles for category: Leadership

The Leader’s Challenge

The Challenge of any Leader is to lead the team today with an eye on tomorrow. You’re always leading a battle on two fronts – today and tomorrow – and it’s one that no one ever sees happening, but daily, it’s happening in your mind as you run through team personalities, external factors, changes in technologies, deadlines, and commitments. Everything and anything. The trap is getting stuck in today because of what might happen tomorrow (process paralysis) without knowing what might happen (changes in frameworks) and doing nothing today. Tickets don’t move, teams sit idle. But at the same time,

Your Meetings Lack Ambition

If your meeting is set up to simply “be there” and “discuss things”, your meeting will never amount to much. Meetings should have purpose, direction, creativity, and perseverance that roll themselves up into the ambition of what is trying to be achieved. You would code through the night to get your product out the door. You would work late into the evening to get the competitive analysis done before deciding what features to implement. You would grind out test cases to ensure the best quality product. Your meetings should have the same ambition that you do.

Directing the Narrative

Everyone has their own narrative, everyone has their own story they tell themselves. Their hopes, their dreams, their purpose, their direction. It’s all wound up in your narrative. The goal of a leader is to get everyone’s narrative on the same page, everyone focused on the same narrative, everyone bought into it, and everyone working towards it. Directing the narrative is the first step to getting your team moving in the same direction.

January 4, 2024

Greg Thomas

Why Attend a Bad Meeting?

You wouldn’t attend a bad movie (or you might start and then leave?) You wouldn’t go to a bad restaurant? You wouldn’t continue going to a bad store you’ve had a continually bad experience with? So why keep going to a bad meeting where you are getting nothing out of?  Where nothing good happens?  Where all you get is a another 5 minutes of your life back at the end?

December 24, 2023

Greg Thomas

Last Chance

The day before the product goes out the door is the last chance you have to fit that last UX bug in. The last chance you have to make a simple update to the documentation. The last time chance you have to get it “right”. All these last changes, generally end in disaster, you miss a space, you break the build, it makes it worse than you thought. And you’re left with it being worse than what it was before. The last chance was two weeks ago, you knew it then, you know it now, so don’t muck with what