mister secretary
A brief recounting of the power of the written word across my life and career. Leadership isn’t in a title, it’s in your words, and you should beware anyone suggesting you outsource them in the name of efficiency.
Tag: Leadership
debugging everything
What is debugging, really? I’ve thought about it for most of my life and never really come up with a satisfactory answer until today.
reviewing performance
Several executives over my career have sat me down, looked me in the eye, and implied I was a naive fool for trusting my employees. Fuck ’em.
that word
I’ve semantically overloaded the word “leadership” to the point that I occasionally forget how far removed my definition is from the popular lexicon.
first resignation
This is a reflection on my first resignation in late 2006, nearly 18 years ago, that I found today while looking for a document in my attic.
owner insecurity
A hallmark of a healthy company is keeping incentives aligned with ownership. The only way to scale this is to focus on alignment, not control.
weighted web
Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat.
psychological safety
Psychological safety is the most powerful productivity multiplier. Without it, no one can take ownership of their piece of the company and make it better.
spring reflection
I’m thinking about how easy it is to get locked into a path. We tell ourselves lies about who we are every day and make choices based on those lies.
predicting leadership
What would you say is the single best predictor for success for an engineering leader? They prioritize listening to the voices with more direct context and they are actively building their understanding of the problem set.
myself again
Leadership skills are the water I swim in and it took a couple years in the corporate wilderness to remember that.
context proximity
The most egregious error I see leaders make frequently is to assume they have more context than the folks doing the work.
startup power
If you don’t invest in engineering leadership early you’re burning your salary budget. Once it’s time for process, you need someone who empowers your engineers and helps them operate safely rather than imposing rules that grind your releases to a halt.
two leaders
How do I say this politely? If you’re the kind of leader who “puts the group before the individual” that usually just means you’re a bad leader and everyone knows it.
graphing teams
I’ve studied many performance rubrics, skill trees, and advancement systems for engineering departments. Boiling them down to core principles can bring clarity when you’re up to your eyeballs in criteria, factors, and value statements.
power structures
As a white dude who can smoothly “pass” as straight and grew up with strong, educated parents in a very stable environment with a strong safety net, I had the privilege of approaching social power structures however I liked. And I chose deeply irreverent.
servant leaders
To me, credibility as a leader is fundamentally whether you’ve convinced me our interests are sufficiently aligned and whether you have the skills & motivation necessary to keep them that way.
family metaphors
Your company isn’t a family. Every time I hear someone describe their workplace as a family, it’s a red flag. It means one of two things: You’re squeezing people, or you’re earnest but inexperienced.
context puzzles
What is software development really if not a sprawling, borderless puzzle for which the lid with the big picture on it is long gone? To me, it seems obvious that the biggest hurdle to team-based software development is how difficult it is to communicate well.