Tech Lead Squad 💪 - What's on Tap This Week (Dec. 2, 2019) - PLUS MORE free training coming up on Saturday

#leadership #career #techlead

Let's start the last month of the year with a plan to finish 2019 strong!

For me, I'm going heavy on my plan to finish the second, more powerful and (hopefully) more impactful revision of my book, How To Be a Tech Lead, by the end of the year. We've had so many unexpected downloads on it, so it's a little embarassing how much needs to be done.

In addition to the book revisions, I've been running through my live training sessions--think it's a virtuous cycle to work on both the training and the book at the same time. Something about speaking it out loud in real time while still producing a written, more thorough product is pretty helpful.

Before I forget, for those of you in the States with me (most of you on the subscription list), hope you had a great Thanksgiving week. 🦃

What happened last Saturday

As I mentioned, I ran through a live training session on YouTube (notice I'm not linking to it because it's a little cringy). It was my first time doing it, so I wasn't really sure how to get the content or the technology quite right.

Sure, I could have practiced and rehearsed, and getting something like that right is super important when you're giving a talk for another community or group. But when it's my own forum and platform, I like to fail forward. Played around with a lot of new ideas, like swapping listening for showing up.

Anyway, was super fun and felt impactful even though almost nobody showed up. We've got another one coming up this Saturday, so I hope you'll sign up and participate. Should be at least 2x better than last week!

What we're going to do this week

Since most of my free cycles (remember, this isn't even a side project; it's just a hobby for me) are going to be taken up with the book and this weekend's trainings, I think we'll draft off of other peoples' content this week.

Quite a bit happened over the past few weeks in the world of tech lead writing and thinking. It's good to share it.

On Monday's podcast and mailing list, I'm going to review some of the most interesting Tweets over the past few days.

We'll also dive into two substantive articles. One from Strategy+Business arguing that listening is a leader's "secret weapon," which you know I'm down with because listening is one of the Four Core tech lead capabilities. We're so bad at listening in this industry and it creates so much havoc--definitely want to dive into this article.

And then another one from a writer on the Pragmatic Engineer blog where he used some learnings from a fantastic book called Turn the Ship Around to create an engineering team where "everyone is a leader."

On Wednesday, we'll see if there are any new Tweets or LinkedIn posts to explore (probably will be). Then we'll dive into a few more posts.

First will be from Dvir Segal on the differences between being a tech lead and a senior engineer. And then another post from SafetyCulture about the tech lead role.

Got some ideas about Friday already, but let's see how the week unfolds. Software moves fast and people are talking a lot about the tech lead role. Let's see what they have to say.