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
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
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
leadership
I went to the eye doctor recently, after my eye was bothering me. I had slept in my contact lenses for several nights (which I'm prone to do), and my eye started bothering me. In the past, when this happens, I take my contact lenses out, throw them
agile
Early in my career, I was a leadership development conference (through Lockheed's great Engineering Leadership Development Program), where we played a game called Gold of the Desert Kings -- it was a group game, in a big event space ballroom packed with engineers from all over the country.
leadership
Have you ever noticed how when something is simplified enough that it doesn't intimidate people, people start to have a lot more opinions? It makes sense that people who aren't rocket scientists shouldn't make recommendations on rocket ship designs. But as complexity is reduced,
CIO
The military classifies some missiles as "fire and forget" because they don't need to be monitored after they are fired. Great leaders are like this -- their boss can give them an objective and know they don't need to follow up over and over
CMMI
There are a lot of ways you can measure and categorize organizational maturity. I'm sure there are several classes you can take on it if you get a MBA. The CMMI Institute, as an example, talks about how organizations move from being managed, to defined, to starting to
leadership
Several years ago, near the beginning of my professional career, I was a junior engineer helping with the design and issuance of new access badges for a campus of employees where I worked. Thousands of employees would be getting new badges, they would wear it around their neck on a