From One Day to Day One: The Future of Engineering and Leadership
In this special edition, I tease the next episodes of the show and make a major announcement about the future of the Engineering & Leadership project.
In this special edition, I tease the next episodes of the show and make a major announcement about the future of the Engineering & Leadership project.
Joseph Seiler has spent his career helping engineers do incredible work by empowering them and stepping back to let them do incredible work – first as the president and CEO of his own company, and today as a Master Certified Coach. Joseph’s experience provides incredible lessons learned for engineering managers of all stripes, most especially the value of coaching as an engineering manager.
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management thinking once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That wasn’t a knock on how important strategy is, rather, he’s emphasizing the importance that culture plays within an organization.
Today’s guest would share that sentiment. Today, I speak with Dan Langevin, the CTO of Vericred about the role culture plays in a technical organization, and specifically about the importance of both accountability and curiosity for Vericred’s engineering team.
Meetings are a fact of organizational life. The fact that so few of us have ever been trained to run excellent meetings is a bit of a shock. We all know they’re needed, and we all know they’re mostly painful and wasteful. If you follow even a few of the ideas in this episode, you and your team will be more engaged, efficient, and effective in your work.
One of the struggles many engineering leaders have is knowing how and when to let go and allow their teams to move forward with their daily work. It can be incredibly difficult to know how to transition from working in the team to working on the team. This leads to micromanagement, impaired performance, and a dearth of leadership and direction.
Luckily, Peter Docker addresses this exact problem in his new book, Leading from the Jumpseat: How to create extraordinary opportunities by handing over control. In today’s episode, I speak with Peter about his new book, the importance of letting go, and what it takes to be a fantastic engineering leader.
Mentorship in the world of engineering is an incredible tool. It helps those being mentored improve job performance, satisfaction, and achievement of long-term goals. For the mentor, it helps connect with earlier stage professionals, organize their thoughts and frameworks around their work, and gives them a chance to give back. Finding or becoming and engineering mentor is a brilliant move at any point in your engineering career.