“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch
Leadership is a set of competencies that can be learned. A search online will present lists of the top N traits of leaders (where N is any number from 5 to 101!)
Commonly these lists include things like honesty, integrity, confidence, communication, decision-making, empathy, focus, enthusiasm, loyalty and decisiveness. Some of these aspects can be considered personality traits but all of them can be learned and strengthened through self-discipline and deliberate intent. Effective leadership has always been a key factor for organisational success, and this remains the case in modern tech-heavy orgainsations.
Traditionally these are not competencies that are heavily emphasized in technology education programs, yet consistently the factors that influence career and organisational success are not how well your product works but how well your teams work together, how well they respond to your customers and how well they are led.
For this eMag, we’ve pulled together six articles from the InfoQ content that explore different aspects of what it takes to lead effectively in the technical world.
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The InfoQ eMag - Becoming a Technical Leader include:
- Great Managers Are Like Great Teachers: Q&A with Jessica Ingrassellino - Differentiated instruction strategies have helped Jessica Ingrassellino find ways for each of her team members to best grow and flourish with the opportunities available. She applies this by adjusting content, process, and outcome, approaching each individual as an individual with respect for their needs.
- How Developers Can Learn the Language of Business Stakeholders - This article explores how business stakeholders and developers can improve their collaboration and communication by learning each other's language and dictionaries. It explores areas where there can be the most tension: talking about impediments and blockers, individual and team learning, real options, and risk management.
- Q&A on the Book Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership - The book Applied Empathy by Michael Ventura explores how understanding people and learning about their perspectives can help us to lead with empathy. Questions are more important than answers; as leaders, we should look for ways to connect with our customers and employees, and listen more and talk less.
- How to Effectively Lead Remote IT teams - When you build your software product or implement a digital platform, there are many things you need to consider – like product design, technology stack, architecture, etc. . And many times we forget, that at the end the most crucial part is the team that will work together to deliver it.
- Author Q&A: from Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams - Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby have written a book titled From Chaos to Successful Distributed Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. The book provides advice for anyone working in or with a distributed team on how to overcome the common (and some uncommon) challenges that distribution and distance bring to effective team collaboration.
- Humanity at Work: Interview with Rich Sheridan, Author of Chief Joy Officer - Richard Sheridan describes the importance of joy and humanity in the workplace and how it contributes to increasing employees' job satisfaction and engagement. Joy has always been important for employees, and today even more as we are welcoming new generations of workers.
InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ content - articles, interviews, presentations, and research - covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics.