Spectrum of Modern Leadership
I want to share with you my experiences, how we turned the game and transformed the organization from a nightmare to a best in class, high performance organization. Within the next articles, I’ll summarize what the most important leadership skills are in my opinion to become successful. Furthermore, I’ll try to give some examples from my personal career as well as from some of the great leaders in the world.
- Part 1: Embrace the Change or Be Changed
- Part 1.1: How to Drive the Change? — The Art of Accomplishment
- Planed Chapter: Leader vs Manager
- Planed Chapter: Build Great Teams
- Planed Chapter: Be a Designer not an Architect
My Motivation:
In the last 6 month, I talked at a lot of conferences and to different kind of managers from different kind of organizations. Overall I got great feedback about the work and progress we took at our organization
(>15000 employees) over the last years. That’s why I decided to share some of my learnings and impressions that I experienced as a technical manager during my career.
Keep Calm and Just Survive Somehow (My Background):
My story is very much a transformation story. How to change very big and complex organizations from a controlled, top-down culture to the extreme opposite self-organized, bottom-up mentality.
After working for a research institute, I started at a big media enterprise in 2011 as a rather unexperienced IT project manager with an PMI PMP certificate in my hand. Back then I wanted to learn how to manage big, waterfall-driven IT projects in a professional way.
But believe me, it was a real mess. I entered a very traditional enterprise with slow decision making processes due to the top-down, silo structured team organization. The centralized IT department had been called the necessary evil and IT had to be cheap. We were only running huge waterfall-driven projects with external developers.
At the same time we were not paid to ask strange question we should just execute business requirements. Everybody felt a lot of pressure as well as fear and nobody was proud of his work.
The product we developed was based on an unstable and monolithic application with a very bad code quality. Back then we lacked process automation and there was no automated or manual quality assurance. We operated all that in a classical IT Operations model by separated ops and development departments.
But we were really able to turn the game by investing in agile processes and in great development teams. We broke our monolith into a service based development approach including high quality standards and a DevOps based continuous delivery model.
How we have changed that you’ll find out in the following articles.
