Video of Developing Eng Leadership Styles.

The last chapter I wrote for Eng Executive’s Primer was this one about developing engineering leadership styles. It’s an interesting chapter to me peronally, precisely because it’s not something I would have agreed with or written five years ago.

This past Friday I gave a conference talk on this topic at LeadingEng New York, 2024. If you’re interested, you can watch a recording of an earlier practice session from a few days before the talk, and can review the slides. I think that the practice session is quite a bit worse than the final talk, which I believe is restricted to LeadingEng attendees.

You can also watch the talk on Youtube directly. The content is similar to the chapter, but takes a bit of a different angle in exploring it.

(Photograph from my former colleague @shidoshi on X.)

Regarding the conference itself, this was my first LeadDev conference that I’d been to, and it was an extremely well put together conference. I personally enjoyed the mix of 20 minute talks (one of which I gave) and 60 minute deliberate working sessions (e.g. Ashley Miller guided through an exercise on honing commercial awareness, and Cat Miller steered refining technical strategy). The working sessions created a nice, ongoing peer learning experience, that reminded me of a transient version of the CTO circle that I run with Uma Chingunde. The working sessions all had written prompts in high-quality printed notebooks, which I thought was quite nice as well, and makes me want to run my next offsite with printed prompts.