Having read recent articles about members of our community and how they have burned out [Burnout, Reset], I decided it was time I told mine. I learned my most valuable work related lesson the hard way. It was my second job and I was taking on what seemed like an awesome project. Creating an application for the Palm Pilot IV. With the courage of any you programmer I embarked on it without only some C++ skills to help me out.

In my previous post I wrote about Culture for Collaboration. One thing I didn’t go into was that in order to create a culture of collaboration, you must first establish basic trust. Trust is something that is extremely hard to just “establish”, it is something you earn. In short, establishing trust is not done over night. So were to start? Empower individuals and teams If you by your actions and words show that you trust a team or individual you will in time earn their trust.

“It is so cumbersome to have go round talking to people and submitting pull requests. Can’t we just go ahead and just duplicate or do whatever we want?” Yes, working together and collaborating is hard. It requires a willingness to listen to others and learning about different points of view. This is of course something which takes time to get right. Because it is about people and dealing with people is different each time and for each interaction.

To me focus is binary, you either have it or you don’t. You can’t somewhat focus on something. Either you do it or you don’t. I also have a strong opinion that focus can only be kept on one thing, if you’re a human without mutations. It is not only my subjective opinion, it is scientific fact that we can only focus on one thing with our eyes. Now, how come every time you hear the word focus in a work setting none of the two previous truths apply?

Yesterday I tweeted that “I’d rather choose someone with experience from kindergarden than some one from the armed forces as a leader”. It might seem like good old fashioned trolling, but I am serious. I speak from a Norwegian perspective and things might be different in other countries. When working in kindergarden you acquire some skills which I think are essential for leaders in general, but especially in knowledge companies. In Norway the law says that children shall always be included in decisions [1].