Leadership

It’s a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce.

One of the easiest ways to increase your value to an organization is to reduce the friction required to get you to do your job.

There is a set of management mistakes that managers make over and over again. Especially likely for newer managers, but it happens to more experienced people too. I’ve made all of these mistakes.

“The three stages of career development are:

1. I want to be in the meeting

2. I want to run the meeting

3. I want to avoid meetings.”

If the product doesn’t work well, the code is not good.

“You hear in business meetings that if you can’t measure it, you cannot improve it. These kinds of statements are taken as truths. And over time, I realized [that] used in the wrong context, they tend to cause a lot of damage that we don’t even realize because we feel like we are being smart when we say, “This thing must be measured before we can i... See more

When leaders exercise authority where they lack competency, they undermine the organization’s efficiency.

Smart people know an unsettling truth: loyalty must be given before it’s earned.

The best leaders I know extend trust and loyalty long before receiving it – they treat people as if they’ve already proven trustworthy. This seems naive until you realize it’s a forcing function: by acting as if people have already earned your trust, you create the cond... See more