Leadership means exposure. I volunteered and demonstrated the work our team did today to an audience of peers, and management. Its necessary to present for a number of reasons. You need to stand out, and you need to get comfortable talking to as many people as you can. The relationships are important, and you can’t settle for being just an employee number. Essential tip: Learn their names and don’t you forget them! Find something to talk about, and if that fails, talk about work, but talk to them damnit! When you make connections you establish rapport. This is the grease that is needed to make influence a smooth process.

Looking Glass Self

After the presentation, I had a call with my mentor, and I asked him how he thought the presentation went. His answer? He asked me how I thought the presentation went! I admitted I was nervous, and that perhaps overshadowed any objective review of how the presentation actually went. I said “I think it was good for the moral of the team”, which he made me immediately quantify. I didn’t have anything ready this time. He wanted me to glance at the team chat. It was full of questions, and praise. People that had no knowledge of what our team was doing were suddenly lighting up the board! That was the proof he said. I’ve got them interested to know more. They are excited, and they want to know more about our process. I spent the afternoon talking with people I don’t routinely talk to about our presentation. People were plugged in to what we were doing.

That Death Star is Fully Operational!

The order of business for this week was to handle front-line issues. He asked me what I thought we needed as a team to proceed. I thought for a moment and told him “we need a plan of attack!”. He asked how I would divide up the work. I admitted I didn’t know what we were supposed to touch, and what was best to leave alone. The work as presented to us not organized. We also needed to button up work from our last assignments, and come to think of it I wasn’t sure if we were focusing on that, or the new work. Time to take a step back before we get in a bad situation.

Enabling Accountability

People want to succeed. And one of the attributes in gauging success is delimiting what you are accountable for. It doesn’t matter if you knock a feature out of the park, if you let two more slide past a deadline, or if you are working on the wrong task all together. You have to enable accountability by pushing back (when needed) requirements as given to you (see Kobayashi Maru). The first task wasn’t a plan of attack at all – it was defining what we were accountable for. You absolutely have to answer this before you can come up with the attack plan. Once you know, you can box off your work, and fill in the gaps.

Lowering Friction

The side I do have the most experience with is the developer role. The worst thing that you can do to a developer is to give them muddy requirements. You can’t win. A developer wants clearly defined requirements for a piece of work to be able to autonomously translate this into machine instruction, and verify that it is operating “to spec”. Its vitally important this occurs. Often the developer will encounter this high friction work. Remember that rapport we built earlier? What better way to smooth out requirements, and axe the nonsensical requirements than to influence the people making the requirements? Make sure you understand what they want so you can deliver effectively. A developer often won’t be in a position to make a decision. You have to decide and be confident in your choices. Its also about standing by those choices, and being prepared to take the heat when your choices aren’t well received.