March 5, 2024
I wrote this article originally on Medium – Team Leads vs Technical Leads – and have been stumped figuring out a follow-up for it. When I wrote it, it drove me home because I see so many developers stuck between being a Team vs a Technical Lead – thinking if they go one way, they close the door on the other role forever – which is furthest from the truth. If anything, it will make you better in the latter, knowing what the other one does.
February 25, 2024
Who does what? Who actually does what? Who needs support? Who is struggling? Who is doing great but getting lazy because they aren’t learning anything? Who is overloaded? Who is being missed? Who needs a kick? These are the questions you need to ask yourself when taking stock of your team. This is what helps you understand who needs help, where and when and how to plan your strategy out to help them.
February 12, 2024
Leading Teams is not an easy endeavour. Nothing ever goes perfectly well and the person to blame will always be the leader. If you can handle and shoulder that blame as you take on a new challenge, as you pick up your feet and try again. You have the makings of a leader, that is in short supply, that your team needs.
February 6, 2024
Remote Leadership is a different beast of leadership. You need to reach out, engage, discuss, follow up, call (yes call), and organize sit-downs. You can’t just walk by someone’s desk and see they’re having a bad day, you need to reach out to them, you need to talk to them, you need to find a way to poke without disrupting them. It’s not easy, it takes effort, and it takes a change in the style of what you’re doing. And that’s where we fall down, not adapting our style to what our team needs.
January 16, 2024
You used to be able to talk with someone and realize the conversation is going to go longer and realize there was a need to have an ad-hoc 2-hour meeting to map out everything that was happening. You never came out of that thinking – “that was a waste of time”. The value of ad-hoc meetings is that they are instantiated at the time a problem is discovered – “Hey we need to chat” – “Yes we do”. The duration of the meeting is dictated by the problem and its resolution, not the clock. The power of the Ad-hoc Meeting
