Videos

Most leaders don't get caught out because they're incompetent. They get caught out because they trusted the first answer they were given. As a leader, you're often under time pressure and you're relying on your team to furnish you with information. So when something sounds reasonable on first answering the temptation is to go with it. And to be fair, you'll get away with that seven or eight times out of 10, but it's the other two or three times out of 10, where the answer wasn't right, that will come back to bite you in the future. And it's not because people are generally trying to mislead you, that's quite rare. It's just that they've got a narrow field of view and they're working with partial information as well. So a simple technique that I use is triangulation, not because I don't believe the first person, I'm absolutely sure that they've given you what they believe to be the right answer. But another two or three people might have a different lens that just adds to the mix. If I hear the same thing from two or three other people, I can move forward with greater confidence knowing that that answer is more likely to be correct. And if I don't get the same answer, I know that I've gotta dig a bit deeper. It might take a little bit more time, but it saves all sorts of headaches later. One perspective on a problem is an opinion. Two or three matching opinions becomes a reality. For more tech leadership insights, subscribe to the channel or follow me.

Lots of leaders fall into the trap of confusing urgency with importance. Just because something's loud, last minute and gets chased for every five seconds doesn't mean it's the most important thing you should be working on right now. A lot of leaders get dragged into false urgency. Someone shouts loudly, an email suddenly appears a deadline suddenly looms. Before you know it, your whole day has been hijacked. But importance is different. Importance is about value, consequence, and strategic relevance. It's about the things that genuinely move the business forward, reduce risk, or improve performance. Urgency is often about noise and importance is about strategic impact. Most people know this as the Eisenhower Matrix, but not many people use it properly. We end up living in the urgent work. And not moving forward the important things that will actually move the dial on your business. Now, obviously some things are urgent and important and you do have to deal with them, but plenty of things are urgent only because somebody else has failed to plan properly or because they want an answer faster, not because the issue actually matters more than other things on your list. Good leaders learn to pause and ask: - Is this genuinely important? - What happens if it waits? - What will I be neglecting if I jump on this now? Because if you spend all day reacting to the urgent things, you'll start missing your commitments to other people for things you were already doing. You'll constantly feel like you're just chasing your tail and you'll end up progressing somebody else's priorities and not your own. Urgent does not necessarily equal importance. Be really clear about the distinction in your own mind. Subscribe for more leadership tips and insights. @Stepthinking www.stepthinking.com

Most leaders don't get caught out because they're incompetent. They get caught out because they trusted the first answer they were given. As a leader, you're often under time pressure and you're relying on your team to furnish you with information. So when something sounds reasonable on first answering the temptation is to go with it. And to be fair, you'll get away with that seven or eight times out of 10, but it's the other two or three times out of 10, where the answer wasn't right, that will come back to bite you in the future. And it's not because people are generally trying to mislead you, that's quite rare. It's just that they've got a narrow field of view and they're working with partial information as well. So a simple technique that I use is triangulation, not because I don't believe the first person, I'm absolutely sure that they've given you what they believe to be the right answer. But another two or three people might have a different lens that just adds to the mix. If I hear the same thing from two or three other people, I can move forward with greater confidence knowing that that answer is more likely to be correct. And if I don't get the same answer, I know that I've gotta dig a bit deeper. It might take a little bit more time, but it saves all sorts of headaches later. One perspective on a problem is an opinion. Two or three matching opinions becomes a reality. For more tech leadership insights, subscribe to the channel or follow me. www.stepthinking.com

Most transformation programmes don't fail partway through. They're set up wrong from day one and for very understandable reasons. Here are the three most common reasons I see where transformation programmes fail. First of all, a lack of clarity about why transformation is even needed. Teams often jump straight into "we need a new platform", but that's not really a strategy. The best transformations I've led didn't replace everything. They kept the things that worked, fixed or replaced the things that didn't, and focused on the business outcomes. Reason number two. Treating a transformation programme like it has to be an entire reset / refresh. In reality, most businesses end up here because they've grown and evolved over time and the business just hasn't kept up. So a good transformation doesn't just fix today's problems, it sets the business up so they never need to do a big transformation program again. And the third reason is programmes that assume that all of the value delivery happens at the end, but that's a high risk strategy because it can take a long time and cost a lot of money to get there. And by the time you do get there, what you deliver may not be what the business needs anymore. So a better approach is to phase work so that you can deliver value incrementally, early, and often. Get those three things right and your transformation has a much better chance of actually delivering value. Subscribe for more practical tech leadership advice.

Here's a controversial opinion. CTO might be the most meaningless job title in tech. And I say that as somebody who's been doing that job for many years because two people can be called CTO and do completely different jobs. At one end of the spectrum, CTO might be the only or most senior developer in a small startup still writing code, building the product, and leading a small growing team. At the other end of the scale, you've got the CTO In a large multinational financial institution, for example, they might be leading hundreds and hundreds of people in tech, but not be that close to technology themselves anymore. And then there's everything else in between. Now that's not to say either end of that spectrum is better or worse than the. They're just different. But it does illustrate why the title CTO on its own is not particularly helpful. I sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum focusing on strategy and transformation, for the most part. I help businesses modernize their technology, scale their teams, and get more value from their technology functions. So when somebody tells you they're a CTO, don't assume you know what they mean. You need to ask "what kind of CTO are you?" If you are operating as a CTO, leave me a comment below to tell me whereabouts on that spectrum you reside. And if you're a business leader with A CTO in your team, have a think about where they sit on that spectrum. www.stepthinking.com matt@stepthinking.com

Many people think that disagreeing with their boss is career suicide, and it really isn't. Just follow these three simple rules. Rule number one, start with curiosity. Assume that your boss knows something that you don't. Your boss will usually have context you can't see, other conversations going on elsewhere. Internal politics, commercial pressures maybe. So instead of saying "That won't work". Start off instead with something like, "help me understand the rationale behind that decision". Rule number two, challenge the idea not the person. Don't attack the decision. Frame your challenge as a risk or an alternative. For example, "have we considered the risk that", or "is there perhaps another alternative like this?" Rule three, pick the right moment. This means challenging in private and supporting publicly. Definitely don't challenge your boss in a room full of people, because then it stops being about challenging the idea and starts being about politics. The best leaders don't want silent teams, they just want thoughtful challenge. Which of these three rules do you think people get wrong most often? Leave me a comment below.

Overthinking doesn't make decisions better, it just makes them slower. In leadership, we've rarely got perfect information. We have partial data, conflicting opinions and time pressures. Overthinking feels responsible. It feels diligent. But very often it's just disguising our fear. Fear of making the wrong decisions, fear that people won't like what we've got to say. And here's what to look out for. If you are constantly revisiting the same arguments, re-justifying your position with different people or talking around the same subject, you're probably not refining the decision. You're just avoiding committing to it. Most strategic decisions are reversable. You can course correct, you can iterate, you can adapt. Momentum isn't killed by imperfect decisions. It's killed by the lack of any decision at all. So if you find yourself revisiting the same arguments over and over again, just ask yourself, am I overthinking it? If you are, make the decision and move on.

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.