Zach on Leadership

Have you ever noticed my tag line? It reads “Better Leaders in Enterprise Technology.” It doesn’t read “Better Leaders in Information Technology.” Why did I do that? There are two primary reasons: scale and scope. Enterprise scale Most companies midsize and up have some sort of IT department. While there’s nothing wrong with working in a small shop, all of my experience has been in large corporations with more than a few billion dollars in revenue. Since I don’t have…

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Two managers talk about training their employees. The first asks, “What if we train them, and they leave?” The second responds, “What if we don’t train them, and they stay?” This is true of every profession, but it cannot be more true for technology professionals. Technology changes so fast and we have an extra burden to stay on top of it. Yet somehow, every place I’ve worked, I’ve seen large groups of engineers that haven’t taken any training in years,…

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I had a great opportunity to be a guest on the Got Friends show with Tony Huang. We talked in-depth about leadership development within IT. Check it out.

The purpose of this blog is to create better leaders in enterprise technology. The assertion that we need better leaders presupposes that there are plenty of bad leaders out there. What do you do if you work for one? Good vs. Bad I probably watched too much He-Man as a kid, because my initial gut reaction is to judge leaders in a binary way: good or bad. You are one or the other. Of course, I think of myself as…

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The best part about technology leadership is that almost every technologist can do it, though few are up for the adventure. To do so requires a willingness to depart from the world of ones and zeros and enter a different world governed by actual human beings. While human beings are in fact, mostly harmless, this other world is a bit unnerving for the average technology geek. Therefore, I’ve assembled this hitchhiker’s guide to help you find your way. Don’t panic…

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Henry Ford is famously credited as saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The attribution may not be accurate, but it’s still stirring. Apple made the iPhone because everyone at Apple universally thought all cell phones stunk. So, they made one that they liked. I gave conference presentations in 2013 and 2015 postulating that when users ask for an iPad for work, they would be better served by a Windows tablet instead….

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In A.D. 2101 war was beginning. Sure, but about one hundred years prior to that, there was an internet meme that went viral at a time where we didn’t know what the term “internet meme” even meant. This was before YouTube and Facebook. Videos were made from Flash or GIFs, and shared via email. All Your Base Are Belong to Us was the preeminent internet meme of the early 2000’s. Why was it huge? Geek kitsch and nostalgia. About 15…

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In many ways I’ve thrived in my career through meritocracy. Competition is one of my top five StrengthsFinder themes. I compete for promotions and new job opportunities. I compete with other companies to get top talent onto my team. I’m intrinsically motivated to be the best performer among my peer group. Sometimes I achieve that and sometimes I don’t, but no one needs to tell me to do it. I naturally pursue high-performance. There are many companies that confidently call…

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I built my career on IT infrastructure. About a year ago, I was given the opportunity to lead software development too. I love infrastructure. I love code. I really love Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC is this end-state nirvana where all of your infrastructure can be provisioned, configured, and maintained programmatically, rather than manually through interactive consoles. It’s only been a recent phenomenon that this is even possible. Infrastructure administrators and engineers all learned how to do their jobs via management consoles,…

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Coaching means a lot of things to a lot of people. Of course, there are sports coaches. In my personal life, I’m a Lego robotics coach. There are also business coaches and life coaches. I’m not a professional coach, at least not as my primary job function. I’m a technology leader. However, to do that effectively, I often need to play the role of a coach. I’ll get into what that looks like shortly, but first, I’d like to take…

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