I pick up hitchhikers. Not all of them, but several over the years. Many tell me that I probably shouldn’t. They may be right, but I have yet to give someone a ride that I wish I hadn’t. This blog article is going to be more personal than professional. However, I have a very relevant leadership lesson to share that I’m certain you can apply to your work. Before I get into that, I’m going to tell you a few…
Every leader, by definition, is an agent of change. If you are just maintaining or running your group, you are a manager. Leadership implies change. Changing people isn’t easy, especially if you want to do it without coercion or authoritative power. How do you go about initiating change? In this article we will learn about change leadership from Obi-Wan Kenobi and see observe how he influenced Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, A New Hope. Please take a few minutes and…
As a developing leader, I’ve taken many personality and leadership assessments over the years. These assessments are common tools for guiding development efforts, helping team members understand each other, and rounding out the diversity in a group. In the halls of corporate IT at various organizations, I’ve often encountered many who would rather take a pass at this introspective analysis and get back to work, but this sort of thing has always intrigued me. I love psychology and philosophy, and…
Last week, I earned my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. AWS has a full array of certifications for various levels of expertise and specialties. This is the entry-level one. Many of you know that I am technology leader with overall responsibilities for cloud technologies at our company, but I am far removed from the hands-on work. It’s safe to say that I am not, nor do I plan to be, an actual cloud practitioner. So, why did I bother with…
I started my career nearly 21 years ago. The first year of my career was dedicated to preparing companies to cross the threshold from 1999 to the year 2000 without any glitches. Now that we are approaching the 20th anniversary of that event, I’d like to pause and reflect on what it was like. Demand 1999 was a great year to get into the technology field. Every company on the planet took inventory of their systems and realized that they…
I had a fantastic opportunity this week to participate in the Lean Executive Leadership Institute through the University of Kentucky College of Engineering. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lean is an organizational philosophy born out of the Toyota Production System, which was first developed by Taiichi Ohno in the 1950’s. Toyota has earned a reputation for operational excellence and has been transparent about their secret to success for generations. Why Kentucky? Firstly, it’s a whole lot closer than…
I’ve been writing the Zach on Leadership blog for over three years now and have produced 170 articles and now recently, 13 podcast episodes. I really enjoy doing it. Regularly, people approach me and bring up my blog, or drop me a note. They typically tell me that they like it a lot, but then quickly follow up with two questions: “Why do you do it?” and, “Where do you find the time?” For the sake of my entire audience,…
I’m the youngest of two. I have a brother who is three years older than I am. We were each other’s primary playmates growing up. We constantly played games together. We played a wide variety of games, but I particularly remember excessive amounts of Foosball, Monopoly, and Super Mario Kart. What do you think happened when I continually played competitive games with someone who was three years quicker and smarter than me? I lost a lot. A whole lot. We…
A leader on my team recently approached me with an interesting question. He asked me, “how do you solve complex problems?” My initial instinct was to ask about specifics: “Tell me about your problem and we will discuss it.” His response was fantastic. He said, “I don’t want you to solve my problem for me, I want you to teach me how to think through it.” That was cool. As a leader, I am used to solving complex problems. Usually,…
I just got back from the deer woods. Each season has its stories, triumphs, and failures. As I drove home from my trip, I considered the leadership lessons from this sport. I thought I’d share my insights with you in this article. I didn’t grow up deer hunting. I married into it. For 19 years, I’ve gone up north with my in-laws and have fully embraced the tradition. Some people grew up with the tradition, but I didn’t. 19 years…