Perspective of the Other Side

Common Leadership Challenges

While working with leaders, I often encounter a recurring issue—they want someone else to change their behavior. For example:

Task-doing vs. Responsibility Taking - A Subtle Distinction

The Subtle Distinction Between Task-doing and Responsibility Taking

I have been reading a book on parenthood recently (yes, tech guys also read such books :-)) and there has been a discussion about responsibility. Even when fathers devote their time to spending time with children and doing some tasks related to children and family, they may still not take responsibility for it. So you can take your children to the doctor when they are sick, bring them to school or kindergarten every day, go with them to a playground… and still not take responsibility.

If You Were to Do One Thing, It Should Be...

Avoid Starting Unnecessary Projects

I have had an interesting conversation with my friend who is also a manager in one of the Polish companies. At a certain moment, he said:

Technical Leader Worries: I Have Too Many Things to Do

Those wonderful days when the only thing you did was writing code are gone. Now you are a leader. You are doing everything: attending or conducting meetings, removing impediments, mediating between team members and the rest of the organization, reading or writing some kind of reports (and you deceive yourself that spending two hours in Excel counts as programming because of some smartly used formulas) and so on. You are in a hurry all the time, and it never ends.

Technical Leader Worries: My Organization Is a Mess, and Nobody Cares

Some time ago, I coined a funny equation like this:

Technical Leader Worries: I Want to Build Trust in My Team but I Don't Want Them to Do What They Want

Understanding Trust in Leadership

Trust is a very big word and very often misused. Many leaders, in an attempt to build trust, feel obliged to allow people to do anything they want. However, they also wish to have some impact on how a task is completed.

Technical Leader Worries: Team Members Are Whining

Understanding Team Complaints

It’s very annoying when you hear whining from your team. They complain about boring work, stupid company security policy, wrong management decisions, customers not knowing what they want and changing their minds, and project managers crowding them. Doesn’t it sound familiar?

Master... Master...

The Role of the Scrum Master

In the real world, there are many variations of this role. Sometimes it’s a person from the team, sometimes a manager, sometimes someone from outside the team, sometimes a specialist in being a Scrum Master, and I’ve even seen it as a rotating role within the team. So, who is it really? What’s the purpose?

Trust in the Team

The Importance of Trust in Agile Methodologies

One of the main values of agile methodologies is trust. However, it is not always clear what this means.

The Charisma of a Leader

The Essence of the Charismatic Leader

Recently, I’ve been working more with leaders of development teams, and I’ve become quite intrigued by the topic of dynamism and the charisma that often accompanies it.