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Do you sometimes wish you had a career plan?
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I've been freelance for three years now, and I admit it: I haven't had a very cohesive plan. I've been reactive, saing Yes to all the things and going where the wind blows me. Since then, I've been doing a whole series of exercises designed to help me decide what I should be focusing on - based on my strengths and previous successes. I've also been telling people this process was "nearly finished" for flippin' ages now. And that when it was finished, I would present the results to anyone who was interested. Then I realised it was never really going to be finished. So some time during the week after next (the week beginning Mon 9th June 2025), I'm going to give a high level summary of what I've been up to and what conclusions I've reached so far. 2. It'll give you a chance to vote on the date / time of the session. My plan is for the session to last an hour and a half, but I'm going to book out a two-hour time slot to leave room for general chat for the last half hour. |
Clare Sudbery
Don't miss my next post! Subscribe to my Technical Leadership newsletter and learn a bunch of useful stuff about effective technical leadership.
All humans have problems from time to time One of the hardest parts about a leadership role is the fact your team are PEOPLE with PROBLEMS and that’s hard to ignore. You might be aware that one of your team members is privately suffering. You might hope you can just ignore it. Or maybe you desperately want to help, or feel like you should help, but either way you don’t know how. First things first: You’re (probably) not a therapist. It’s absolutely not your job to fix people’s personal...
"I'm nowhere near as good technically as the senior devs in my team." I hear this repeatedly from many of the technical leaders I work with. But let's dig in a little... "Our team performs well because I lean on my senior devs for execution, and they lean on me to make sure they get whatever they need." OK, so you're definitely performing a useful purpose? "I understand the business logic, dependencies of upcoming projects, can do T Shirt sizing alone and I run technical analysis meetings...
Workshops for technical leaders, in London and Cornwall How technical do technical leaders have to be? Are you worried that you’re too hands-on, or not hands-on enough? Are you exhausting yourself trying to keep up with every technical detail in your domain? Sometimes individual contributors are promoted to leadership positions and worry that they won’t be as hands-on as they used to be. Sometimes they worry that they no longer have time to stay up to date with modern technology and / or the...