Bunch of weekend house cleaning + Five mistakes of a new tech lead (No. 69)
Community with retake center stage soon tech leads!
Hey tech leads,
Hope you had an awesome weekend. For my part, I mostly tried to recover from the epic, Stateside Halloween week. (If you don’t have little kids, you may have been spared.) I used the quiet of the weekend to get caught up as much as I could.
Last week, I focused on trying to bring you original programming around what it means to have an impact as a tech lead. (Although, I kind of left you hanging on Friday again; sorry for that.)
This week, I’m going to back off the original content a bit and focus on reviewing some of my favorite articles on tech leadership. I’m not being lazy, it’s just that I’m also working on some other big improvements that I want to bring.
But first…
Did some Tech Lead Coaching house cleaning this weekend
I finally got honest with myself and admitted that I sure made a mess out there in internet land.
A completely out of date website at techleadcoaching.com with an out of date onboarding process that people were actually starting to use a little more consistently
“Temporary” podcast cover art that had become kinda permanent
A Twitter account with a terrible logo—again, stagnant and out of date
A Substack account with my picture and not much mention linking to the tech lead coaching “brand” (which is an insult to brands all over the world to even use that word)
A LinkedIn page that hadn’t been touched in months
And, possible worst of all, I had left the very old whiteboard logo with the letters “TLW,” which must have confused everyone (it came from the Tech Lead Workshop days).
Without going back through that list to give you an update on what I did, I think I did a lot to clean up all of the above and at least make it appear a bit more consistent.
I’m sure I have a lot more to do.
Prepping a return to open source / community roots
The big thing that I’m going focus this week and next is getting us back to where we started with the tech lead stuff: back to community and open source.
I started this tech lead journey about three or four years ago—I think when I first started the Tech Lead Workshops Los Angeles meetup group, but maybe a little before that when I had a website called Craft/Leadership.
Anyway, when I started the Meetup group, it was all about creating a community around tech leadership. The idea was to have tech leads coach each other. But at the time, I really didn’t have anywhere near the critical mass I needed. Surprisingly, I think we’re getting a lot closer.
As such, some of my squad goals for the week include:
Getting the book, How to Be a Tech Lead, back onto GitHub and possibly added to that “read the docs” service, whose name escapes me at the moment.
Reworking the techleadcoaching.com onboarding experience just a little. As I mentioned, over the weekend I added a Typeform experience, which is cool, but I don’t think it has all the interactivity we need—even though it has a lot. Basically I want folks to have a guided experience through the Network, so if you have free or open source recommendations please let me know.
Also, trying to make the matching service that I plan to do manually (candidly, I haven’t actually matched anyone up yet—see above) much more transparent.
Start trying to be more inclusive in terms of soliciting outside ideas and content to cover, highlight, and share with you all. (It appears I don’t actually know everything about the tech lead role.)
Consider doing some kind of lightweight, manual coach “certification” process where I’d at least work with the folks who might want to be coaches to help get them some light training on how to do it.
There are a few things that didn’t really make the list. The one I love to have more than anything is a Slack channel—or something like it—but I’m pretty sure at this point that almost nobody wants to add yet another Slack channel to their Slack app. And even if they did, I’m pretty sure it would be rare for you to switch over to the channel.
Still, there must be some kind of way to create some interaction among us that’s not scammy or anything. In the old days I would have turned to one of those open source forum boards—but IDK. Not sure anyone wants yet another forum site that they keep forgetting to check.
Onward to something more useful to you for today
Today, I want to draw your attention to a subtly amazing post from 2018 called Techie to Tech Lead: My Five Biggest Mistakes from Peter Gillard-Moss at ThoughtWorks. I absolutely love this article—not so much for the content as for the fact that the teachings are clearly based on some hard-won insights and experiences from Gillard-Moss.
Since I’m running a little long on today’s letter, I highly recommend you listen to today’s podcast for details, or better yet, just read it directly from the source.
In a nutshell, however, here are Mr. Gillard-Moss’s key five lessons:
Mistake No. 1: I believed my technical ability entitled me to lead
No. 2: I focused on tech when I should have broadened my capabilities
No. 3: I continued to see myself as an individual producer
No. 4: I wanted to know, and control, everything when I needed to empower others
No. 5: I didn’t recognize that the signals changed
That last point is particularly insightful.
READ IT TECH LEADS!
-michael
Thanks for reading and being part of the community!
The Tech Lead Coaching email list and podcast are written and recorded by Michael Rice to bring more clarity, certainty, and confidence to my tech leads.
Tips? Have something you’d like me to cover or someone you want to me talk to? Drop me an email to me@michaelrice.com. Hope you will th
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