Leadership

A person starts to lead when she takes responsibility of something greater than just herself. Before this, she needs to learn to lead herself. This means she needs to take responsibility and make a decision to sit on the drivers seat. It is quite easy to blame someone else when something goes wrong. It takes courage to admit that I had the choice, I made the decision and it turned out to be wrong. But it's a necessary step towards leadership.

Leader should be vulnerable. Admit your mistakes. Say you are sorry. Ask other professionals for guidance and be willing to change your opinion when you see better facts and hear better arguments.

Don't try to be something you are not. Even if you have a few rough edges it might be better to show them than act. People can see through facades. But if you are rude, it still might be wise to polish your manners.

Empathy is a core leadership skill. But even empathy can be learned. Think about how your actions affect others. Or, better yet, ask them! And listen to the answers.

One dilemma in leadership is that many believe in leading by example. I do so too. But in expert organization that isn't usually a choice. The people in your team are better in their craft than you. So another leadership style kicks in: stay back and let other people shine. Support them. Clear obstacles from their path. And boost their confidence by telling them how much you respect them.

Inhale blame, exhale credit to others.

I'll open this up. You are the leader. You take the blame. Period. It doesn't really matter what happened, it can be discussed later (and should be analyzed with maybe 5xWhy?), but right there in the moment when shit hits the fan you take the blame. No excuses. Then, when the dust settles, you stop for a while with your team and have a retrospective. You learn and you try to make sure the same doesn't happen again.

And the credit part. When something great is achieved it is usually a group effort. Leaders many times get to represent others in events, but when positive feedback is given, make sure you remember that it is for the team. Thank them. Thank them in public. And celebrate the successes in private too. Raise toasts or have a bun together. (bun intended)

All pictures from Gratisography.

Team Agility

I'm not really much of a manager. Probably a slightly better coach, but mostly I'm a leader. I can give people direction and help them find the path. I don't like to tell them exactly what steps to take, just where I want them to end up. And when possible, I can walk in front of them or with them depending on the situation.

But I have a problem when I don't know where we should be going. Usually the company Vision and Strategy give guidance. But when the strategy work is still ongoing, one needs to make do without one.

In uncertain conditions it might be good to go to basics, identify the 'axioms'. When there are many unknowns, what can you rely on?

What can you rely on?

What me and my team decided to do was to improve our own group work. We are a loose group of people who work in the customer front in different roles. We are also guiding the work of others as project managers and team leaders. If we can work together seamlessly, it benefits the whole unit.

We decided to work more in pairs and coach each other. Some wanted to expand their profiles, some wanted to still concentrate more on their current role. We also decided to invite each other to our retrospectives and to arrange sessions specifically for sharing knowledge. Then we decided to change our work planning meetings (that had previously concentrated on resourcing) to sessions that combine resourcing, ongoing projects and new sales cases to get a better visibility to where we are and where we are going.

Add visibility. Prepare for changes.

These changes will increase staff liquidity, our visibility and our ability to respond to changes (which I call agility). Regardless of what the new strategy will be, these changes will help to implement it.

This post originally appeared in my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to check it out too.

Jogging Meeting

I have an impression that walking meetings are currently all the hype. Because everything should be always tested before judging, I decided to give it a spin. But why settle for a walk if you generally move faster?

So we decided to go for a jogging meeting with one of my team mates. I know he's an active runner and I too occasionally enjoy going for a run. And we have one-on-one meetings biweekly anyway.

When clock hit 2 PM we went to staff changing room and took the elevator down. Fortunately my team mate had been smarter than me and thought of a good route before hand. I had just thought about it, but didn't ever have time to do that. As one can guess, route length is an essential factor for keeping the meeting in schedule.

Weather was cold but sunny, practically no wind. A really nice running weather. Close to the office there was still some traffic, so it was not so easy to have a conversation. But after the first couple hundred meters we reached a calmer grounds and the conversation was easy.

Another factor to keep in mind is pace. Don't go too fast or you will be just huffing and puffing. With a decent pace you can talk, but still get some exercise.

During the jogging we discussed some memorable events from the past couple of weeks and how's the cooperation with other team members and rest of the organization. But since these one-one-one's are my substitute for development discussion, I wanted to also discuss future. For most this is a difficult topic (it is the same for me too), but I think it's also really important. I demand Product Managers to share their Roadmaps, because it means that we have some plans for the future and we won't be just hitting a wall after the current Release is finished. That's why I'd like people to also have plans for their future. Many times these plans can be beneficial from company's point of view also.

Skipping to the end: we reached the office safely, went to shower and got back to our computers. As an experience I think jogging meeting is definitely worth trying. Of course there are certain prerequisites, but if everything is matches and you feel like it, go for it! I'm pretty sure we'll try this again.

Scales and Emergent Properties

It is fascinating how things look different depending on the distance. From space Earth looks like a blue ball with some green stuff here and there. By zooming closer one can see the continents and mountains and some of the biggest man-made structures like highways. Going closer still and taking a helicopter view the individual houses are yet indistinguishable, but cities have forms.

Humans can't usually see the forest for the trees. Trees are closer to our scale and we usually look at them from the ground up, not from top down. Also we and all the organic material around us consists of small cells. Many of them have a specific purposes (like muscle or brain cells). They are visible with a microscope.

If you could magnify even more, you would see that even the cells aren't the ultimate building blocks. They could be further divided into atoms which could be further divided into quarks (and maybe even further, but let's stop here.)

Many of these levels have their own forces and interactions. Quarks can feel the strong interaction (or nuclear force). In their world, gravity or electromagnetism isn't very interesting. On the other hand, interactions and events on the cosmic scale take so long and distances are so big that compared to them the human lifespan is only a drop in an ocean.

The same fascinating scale related properties exist also in the corporate world. Individual people, teams, units and companies work on different scales. After saying this I do admit that some exceptional individuals might match the output of a whole team or even a small company. But I'd claim that there are such efforts that simply aren't doable without the appropriate size. And yes, on the other hand bigger scale usually makes things more stiff and slower.

I think a team has a lot better chances to really finish a software feature. And I mean the whole deal: thinking about the usability, implementation, documentation, testing, optimizing, refactoring and packaging everything into an appealing form. And if we go a bit further and think about productization of an idea, I think a company is better off than a team or an individual. Sales and marketing are essential activities. But such capabilities aren't often found in the standard developer skill set. For a company to be successful, both skills are needed. But individual people can be highly successful in their roles with only one of these skills.

No-one can do everything. By working together we can make great things happen. With the joint effort of brilliant minds we have been able to reach the space and descend into the deepest ocean depths. If we could work together as a planet who knows where we would end up... But currently I'm happy to follow the road ahead with my company. :)