I've been fortunate to work with some incredible leaders throughout my career.
These individuals have inspired and challenged their teams and driven them to achieve their full potential.
What truly sets a leader apart, however, is their ability to motivate and their willingness to fight for their team.
There's something special about a leader who fights for their team.
In this post, I'll explain what happens when a leader truly stands up for their team, sharing my firsthand experiences from a transformative project at Cambridge Assessment in 2007.
As an England football fan, I know the feeling all too well. The heartbreak of watching your team come so close, only to fall short at the final hurdle once again. It's now 58 years of hurt.
It's a mixture of emotions – frustration, disappointment, and knowing the team could have done more.
I've experienced a similar feeling in my work as a consultant.
As the English Football League nears the climax of another demanding season, leaders are confronted with the challenge of motivating weary players and handling the intense mental and physical pressures of chasing titles, securing promotions, or avoiding relegation.
As a Barcelona supporter, it might come as a surprise that I using Jose Mourinho, a figure often mired in controversy, who exemplified empathetic leadership during his reign at Inter Milan, leading to their historic treble win.
You've probably heard someone quote Norm Kerths' Prime Directive during a retrospective
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
In my experience, engineering teams doing their best at that time inevitably end up having to shoehorn features as requirements change or new information becomes available.
In this post, I'll discuss why great products need strong foundations.
In 2015 I was hired by Cambridge University Press to develop a web application providing digital access to over 35,000 books and 1.5 million journal articles, consolidating several smaller sites. The application would go onto have over 2 million users a day and generate £65 million in revenue per year.
It was a fantastic technical learning opportunity, but it was our culture and approach to product development that would teach me the most important lesson of all.
