Everyone wants to be a great leader, but who cares about being a great follower? Leaders are winners and followers are… dare I say, losers? Growing up in the 90’s, all the kids wore No Fear shirts. I remember one of them read “second place is the first loser.” I think that’s how we look at followership. If we can get past the “followers are losers” mentality, then we may be tempted to look at followership as a stepping stone…
It’s fun to look back and remember that first tech job. The entry-level position with little pay and little respect, but a necessary rite of passage in every IT professional’s career. Mine came at an opportune time, January 1999. This was a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to cash in on the unlimited funding that was thrown at squashing the ubiquitous Y2K bug. So there I was, after three semesters of college and no experience, ready to start my first full-time tech gig….
Talking about leadership styles is something leaders do. I have this style, you have that style, etc. I like to talk about Servant Leadership, not so much as a personal preference, but as an aspiration. Servant Leadership is the most ideal way to lead, but it’s not very easy to pull-off. What is Servant Leadership? The concept of Servant Leadership is as old as Scripture. Jesus Christ turned the world upside down with a radically counter-cultural way to lead: “Jesus…
I’m an introverted technology geek, so by nature I enjoy talking to computers a whole lot more than talking to actual humans. However, as I started to emerge as a technology leader, I realized that in the marketplace of ideas, it’s not the best ideas that win, but the best communicated ideas that win. Generally, I feel that I am a pretty effective communicator, but there was one form of it that strikes fear into my heart: public speaking. About five years…