Leadership roles can be tough. Whether you are principle engineer on a piece of work, leading a development team, taking responsibility for a functional area or heading-up an organisation, you are more often than not going to find yourself in challenging circumstances.
How do you increase leadership throughout an organisation? Imitating the behaviours of those thought to be high-achieving leaders may not be the right approach at all.
Some of my colleagues and I were lucky enough to spend some time with Ian Bateman, one of the Football Association’s youth coach educators and Head Coach of England’s partially-sighted Futsal squad. as an opportunity for us to learn about coaching and leadership from outside of the software development "bubble".
I attended the Agile Manchester 2018 conference to share Redgate’s journey with team autonomy and learn from other agile practitioners. Here are my highlights from the conference and my biggest takeaway - it's all about The Why.
Ever been sat in a 1 to 1 meeting with one of your team and felt like you were struggling to concentrate on them - unable to really listen to what they had to say or explore their problem with them? Well, I have. So, I’ve experimented with going for a walk during these "catch-up" sessions. It’s been great.
If times are tough on an agile project, whatever you do, don't cancel the Retrospective meeting. If you think that having the team in a meeting room for one hour every two weeks is going to make your project fail, then it's going to fail anyway.
As we near the end of a year, people managers across the world will be aware of the looming, ominous shadow of a well-known nemesis; the annual appraisal process. But at Red Gate, we don't do annual appraisals. Here's why.
As leaders of experienced, skilled and knowledgeable staff, we want team members to be able to speak up and disagree with something they don’t think is right. We want people to highlight the problem that no-one else has thought of. However, a dissenting voice can be very disruptive when it goes against the goals, direction... Continue Reading →
For those of you who don't know the name Brian Clough, let me introduce him: Clough was the manager of the football team I support - Nottingham Forest - from 1975 to 1993. He guided Forest to the League Championship for the first and only time in their history in 1978. He then led them... Continue Reading →
The group of talented engineers I currently lead have formed into a great team over the last year. Recently, I've been considering what I thought that was down to (as it would be quite useful to know!). Was it simply the somewhat fortunate mix of personalities who were allocated to the project? Was it blind... Continue Reading →
Leading Agile Teams 