leadership
It's easy for leaders, especially ones early in their careers as leaders, to struggle to see the bigger picture (instead being focused on managing/coordinating/triaging the day-to-day operations of a team/department/division (losing the forest for the trees). When that happens, inexperienced leaders may respond to
leadership
If you're a leader, being able to effectively lead the tough, important, critical, crucial, game-changing conversations is a huge piece of being able to succeed. It's certainly worth reading great resources in this area like Patterson's Crucial Conversations. When you need to have a
leadership
Most teams have a lot of recurring tasks they have to keep track of, such as an HR team doing annual benefits 'open enrollment', or an IT Service Desk team reviewing weekly automated backup status messages, or an Accounting team doing their monthly book close, or that annual
leadership
It sounds obvious, but as a leader, it's critical to manage a team based on the team's current maturity level. For example, if you have a high-maturity, high-performing team stacked with A+ players who know how to do their roles well, are excellent at the needed
lessons-learned
If you're ever in an environment as a leader where things are crazy-chaotic, and it feels like all you do is play whack-a-mole, constantly putting out fires (issues) reactively and you're not advancing any of your priorities, you need to do something that will feel counter-intuitive.
leadership
It's easy to undervalue leadership, and think that just being good at the "hard skills" of your career and telling your direct reports specifically what you want them to do will be sufficient, but as team's and organizations grow, that doesn't scale.
leadership
I'm enjoying the audiobook Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell, a football coach who pivoted mid-career into a business executive in Silicon Valley, as an executive at Apple, a CEO of Intuit, and an executive coach to Steve Jobs and other high profile leaders. One of the great
CIO
I recently went to the 2019 Gartner Security and Risk Summit in National Harbor (outside of DC). This was my second Gartner conference, and so far they're 2 for 2 at delivering high-quality, impactful, intense 5 day conferences. The event was jam-packed with great sessions, roundtables, workshops, and
agile
At the recent 2019 Capability Counts conference, hosted by the CMMI Institute, I presented a session related to Enforcing Quality with DevOps Pipeline gates, where I provided an introduction to the concepts and technologies of DevOps, and how to use the concepts of Continuous Quality to improve software quality earlier
miscellaneous
I've been reflecting recently on my father's life and what he taught me. My father was great (though certainly not perfect), and I keep appreciating more and more how different he was from the 'average father' in many ways. Many of these storied reminded
leadership
A dedicated employee who will work harder, with a greater sense of urgency (and maybe some extra hours when needed) is great. But what's much more valuable than someone with that work ethic, is someone who can see when working harder isn't going to work, and
lessons-learned
There should be a word for people who have the annoying tendency to point at problems and talk about them, instead of trying to actually improve the situation (or maybe there is, and I just don't know it). I don't know if you've been