One belief followed me across every company I worked at: the best solutions never came from telling engineers what to build. They came from showing them why it needed to be built. Here is what happens when you bring engineers into the problem early.
At the director and VP level, competence is expected. The leaders who have real influence vs. the ones constantly pushing uphill are not separated by output — they are separated by whether the room trusts them. Here is what builds that trust.
I spent 17 years managing software teams at companies like Amazon and Snap. The thing that made me leave was not frustration or burnout. It was honesty about which part of the job I actually wanted to spend my time on.
A new CEO coaching survey out of Hoover Institution @ Stanford. The headline: 58% of CEOs now use a professional coach — up from 34% a decade ago. Here are the takeaways worth knowing.
As your scope grows, getting buy-in and influencing without authority becomes table stakes. Here is a concrete exercise for building the kind of high-trust relationships that make everything else easier.
A set of introspective questions for leaders willing to take a hard look at the signals they are sending. The first in a DIY Executive Coaching series — frame the scenario, then pass the ball to you.