I I’m have interviewed for higher management positions during my career. One question which pops up in all of them is this: “do you have experience in leading through middle managers” A fair question one would think given that as a higher position manager you’ll have some other managers below you. However, there is one thing I’ve seen many places which too many higher level managers miss. That’s the ability to keep in touch with what’s happening on the lowest level.

Many companies spend an awful amount of resources and focus on trying to motivate their employees. This is of course I theory a great thing which should benefit employees. There is however one thing every company should look into before looking at how to motivate: What are we doing which demotivate people? Are there hurdles in our organization which prevents people from doing their job? Is there something we’re doing which drive people nuts?

I remember reading about The Change Function, which was a term I first read in the book with that as the title by Pip Coburn. I was recently reminded about this as there was a discussion at work about how NodeJS was slipping in unnoticed, while things such as Grails or Scala was having a more difficult time. I think that NodeJS is making headway in rapid fashion because it has both the parameters needed for the change function:

To me a vision is not a list of items to do. It is not bullet points on a slide. Nor is it a graph which points upwards. It is not numbers added together to make an even larger number. A series of the above things is definitely not a vision. A vision is something that appeals to emotions and which triggers images to appear in the minds of the listeners.

Countless times throughout my career I have heard (and I think I’ve said it too): “you must pick you battles”. I have always struggled to believe this. Why should you not make the case for what you believe? It shouldn’t be a limit for anyone for how many times they can voice their concerns. If you have a climate where people are taught by example that you must pick your battles, what does that mean?