Articles for category: Leadership

October 23, 2021

Greg Thomas

The Challenge to Learn

Code is constantly changing. I can spend 2 minutes on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube and find new frameworks and approaches to building a career than I ever could at any time in history. And yet we still push back against learning. What are we doing wrong and what is holding us back?

The Team Bridge

Teams don’t just work and they don’t just magically come together. It takes work and time. As soon as I see an email that ends with “let’s do this as a team” – I know there is something wrong, that the bridge isn’t there and this is a half-hearted attempt to deal with the problem. Building bridges between teams is not easy but if you’re writing your team announcements or motivation quotes in an email. You’re not even close to starting to build that bridge.

Its the Recovery that Matters

I don’t worry about the falls. I don’t worry about the slipups. I don’t worry about things that are missed. Because we’ll figure it out, we’ll learn how to get better, we’ll figure out what we did wrong and fix the problem. The recovery is what I look for, if you can bounce back from defeat, from failure, from mistakes – that’s what will always matter. Will you blame your team? Will you beat yourself? Will you lash out at everyone else? Or will you lead the team out, accept the problem and move on?

What can your Team Do?

That’s the question you need to be asking yourself as their Dev Manager all the time. What can they do? What can they do that they are not doing? What can they do if I let them have a run at it? What can they do if I took a step back? What can they do if I left the planning up to them? The goal isn’t to overload your team and gives them MORE work to do, the goal is to find out what they can do that they are being held back from doing.

October 17, 2021

Greg Thomas

Leading Sprints

The goal of every sprint should be pretty simple, irrespective of the release, and one that the team can easily get behind… “Did we do what we said we were going to do?” This is a statement that everyone can get behind – whether you’re pushing self-organization, leadership, accountability, responsibility – it’s clear what the beginning and end goal of the sprint is. But often we lose sight of the goal when it’s supposed to be a quick 100/200/400M in front of us (no one sprints an 800M or 1500M). If your team isn’t achieving that one goal, the question