Videos

If you are trying to work out how to motivate your teams, something's already wrong. I get asked this a lot, "How do you motivate your teams?" And honestly, I think that's the wrong question because motivation isn't something that you do to people. It's not a tactic, it's not a workshop. It's certainly not pizzas on Friday. Motivation is a natural byproduct of the environment people work in. If you create the right conditions, they will be motivated to do good work. In my entire career, I can count on two hands the number of people who've deliberately set out to do a bad job. Most people want to do good work. They want to contribute, and they want to feel proud of what they do. So when motivation is low, it's not usually a people problem. It's an environment problem. So instead of asking, "How do I motivate my team?", ask yourself instead, "What's draining my team's motivation?", because that's where the real answer lies. Usually it'll be something like lack of clarity, mixed messages, changing priorities, or moving goalposts, or maybe a lack of trust through micromanagement or decisions being overturned for no apparent good reason, or a lack of recognition and fairness. Good work going unnoticed and poor behaviour being tolerated. All of these things can result in a feeling of demotivation in good team members. So the job of a good leader isn't to apply motivation to people. It's to create the environment within which people want to work so that they'll be naturally motivated all by themselves, and that means clear direction, removing blockers, recognising good performance and not tolerating poor behaviour. Fix those things and the motivation will usually follow. I've created a free crib sheet that breaks this down into actionable things you can do to create the environment for your team to be motivated. Download it now from www.stepthinking.com/downloads. Use it with your team and start fixing the environment, not the people. www.stepthinking.com/downloads.

I hear this a lot from team members... "I shouldn't be accountable for team goals because I don't control what everybody else does". On the surface that might sound reasonable, but let's follow it through. As you become more senior, you control less and less of the individual tasks, and yet you become more accountable. Accountable for all of it. I don't control every decision. I don't do the work, but I'm still accountable for the outcome. Because in leadership, accountability isn't about control. It's about influence, clarity, and stepping in when needed, if something misses, the question isn't, did I do it myself? The question is, did I set up the conditions to allow that piece of work to be successful? If you only want accountability for what you can directly control, then maybe leadership isn't For you. Accountability without control isn't unfair. It's just a fact of life In leadership, it's the job. If you are making a step up from a team member position into a leadership role, and you want some help managing that transition, why not leave me a comment or drop me a message and we can have a conversation about how I might be able to help you make that step from team member status to leadership.

There's a lot of hype around AI tools, but some of them are weaving themselves nicely into our day to day lives, and making mundane tasks easier or quicker. What tools are you using? I'd love to know. Listen to the end for an unexpected surprise

If you're going into a new technology leadership role (or any role in leadership for that matter), you will want to arrive prepared on Day One. Follow this 10 point checklist for your preparation ahead of Day One and you won't go far wrong in terms of feeling (and being) prepared for the job. If this checklist resonates with you, you can find more information in "100 Day Plan Toolkit for Technology Leaders to Hit the Ground Running", available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon (https://amzn.eu/d/a9QWVBd).

In the modern age of CI / CD, do people still feel the need for code freezes? Typicallly businesses pause deployments for a couple or three weeks over the festive period in order to minimise the risk of issues while they're running on reduced coverage from the team due to holidays. But is it really needed anymore? That said, if you are having a code freeze over Christmas, this video gives you some ideas about what you could get the team doing that moves you forward or catches up with stuff that might have been neglected through the course of a busy year :-) Merry Christmas from me and Stepthinking! Have a great 2026!

Do you need to grow your technology team to support your growth or you're not sure what you need or how to get it? Talk to me about what you need to achieve and I'll tell you what I think you need in terms of a team and then if you'd like me to, I can go ahead and put the team together for you. Growing a team isn't just about adding headcount, it's about making sure you've got the right capability and capacity in your teams to support your ambition. I can help you design the structure you need, identify the roles and then crucially find the right people. It minimises the risk of costly missteps and builds a team that can get up to speed quickly, deliver reliably and scale with confidence. If you know that you need increased capacity or strength and capability in your technology teams but you're not sure where to start, let's talk. If that sounds like you are your business, Send me a message or leave me a comment below and let's have a chat.

As a business leader, you don't need to know all of the details of how your technology works, but you do need to know why you're using it. The best CEOs and execs don't get bogged down in the detail, but they do ask the right questions. Questions like: What business value does this create? What risks does it introduce or mitigate? How will we know when it's worked? Those sorts of questions directly link technology decisions with with business outcomes, and that gives your technology leaders the clarity they need to deliver with confidence. So, as a business leader, you don't necessarily need to be able to speak the language of technology, but you do need to speak the language of outcomes. If you stay curious about the why and the what, your technology team will work out how!

People talk about technical debt as if it's a bad thing, a sign of poor engineering or perhaps weak leadership. But it isn't. Tech debt in itself is not a bad thing. Not everything that's wrong in your systems is technical debt. Some of it might be a result of poor decision making or a hasty implementation. But just as often it's because the solutions have become unfit for purpose over time. The world changes, expectations move on, and software that was once absolutely fit for purpose is no longer up to the job. True technical debt is different. It's when you knowingly take a shortcut or make a compromise in order to achieve a goal, but with every intention to put it right later. And that's fine as long as you've got a repayment plan for that debt. Only take it on if you can afford to meet the repayments. It's absolutely fine to achieve a shorter term goal by taking on that longer term commitment. Track the debt you've taken on deliberately. And don't hide behind the label of technical debt when something simply outgrown its usefulness. Because managed debt is a strategy ignored or misunderstood debt is just negligence in disguise. www.stepthinking.com