Tag: leadership
All the articles with the tag "leadership".
The four weeks I spent not doing my job
Another semi-management story. On an AWS ProServe engagement, a big four partner had already owned the project for six months, and they wanted us nowhere near the real work. My first instinct was to push for a seat at the decision-making table, and that instinct was the problem. Here is what four weeks of deliberately not doing my job cost, the technical debt I watched pile up, and why the trust-building turned out to be the work itself.
The engineer I kept promoting anyway
A management story instead of an architecture one. I found Andrew in our company's training lab and over four years promoted him from student to architect. He was reliable, independent, technically excellent, and great with peers and customers. He was also, to exactly one person, a persistent pain: me. The Friday-evening complaint calls, the mailing list he quietly unsubscribed from to needle me, the HR conversation that backfired, and the promotion committee that needed an architect I happened to be. How I learned to manage for the team's output and not for my own comfort.