Who Have You Lifted Up Today?
Contrary to what you might think, hoarding power and being involved in everything is not a powerful move. The real influence is in making room for others and lifting others up. Prepare the new generation in your field and enable them to grow. Cast the stage light on others.
Contrary to what you might think, hoarding power and being involved in everything is not a powerful move. The real influence is in making room for others and lifting others up. Prepare the new generation in your field and enable them to grow. Cast the stage light on others.
Yet again, research highlights the increased business value of networked organizations and leadership as part of all positions. In other words, if you want accelerated business growth, you need a leadership mindset for the future, not control hierarchies of the past. It’s not just for the younger generations, software teams or Scandinavian flat hierarchies anymore. How you organize your organization has a clear business impact. The below article aligns with the work of Westrum and the DevOps movement.
Steve Denning
As an advisory consultant, I often make my customers and those I enable shine and succeed. As Jerry Weinberg put it in The Credit Rule You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit. ( credit is though here to Markus' quote collection)
There are at least these additional aspects to consider:
- Stop the gatekeeping
- Provide starting grounds
- Check your biases
Stop the Gatekeeping
Recently Marcus Hutchins (aka malwaretech) shared an important view on the gatekeeping and barriers of entry into the cybersecurity field. How people in the field are making joiners feel inferior and there is a toxic hacker mentality. I recognize this similarly from the testing community, where there has been a tendency to throw new arrivals under the bus or make them go through unnecessary hoops to contribute.
The IT business and cyber in particular are in need of more people - and people with a diverse set of skills, as the challenges are both technical, organizational and people problems. We need more people and for that, they need a good start.
Provide the Starting Grounds
While you would think that most people have a clear path from uni/college into their current job, a recent study showed that only 27% of US college graduates end up working in their field of study. About 3/4 do something else. (Reference)
I recognize this similarly from the testing community, where everyone has a different origin story. While developers might have a straightforward career path - the general trend, as per above, is that most people rarely use their original degrees 1-1. Also considering that job types are never static. The job I had never existed when I joined the testing field 20 odd years ago and wasn’t anything I trained for in my computer science master's degree.
Check you biases
If you only hire seniors or similar pre-trained people with a dedicated degree level, you are missing out on fresh perspectives and people with a learning and curiosity mindset. As soon as your team masters something, build the starting grounds for the next generation.
If you tend to power grab, stand down and check your ego at the door. Check who you are promoting in your corporate communications, is it the managers and top brass - or the people doing the things? Is it always the same people that get the spotlight?
Who have you lifted up - today?
