Srđan, Andrea, and Petar invited me to join them at the Leading in Tech meetup in Zagreb to exchange thoughts and experiences around leadership and management skills. I thoroughly enjoyed the questions from the hosts and the audience, during the official agenda and later during the food and drinks part.
Here are some key statements that were discussed or answers to repeated questions from multiple people at the meetup.
- Srđan brought up the 22-second leadership lesson in the discussion, and I referred to it several times. After the main Q&A part, several groups came to a similar conclusion about traits and behaviors that great senior leaders exhibit. And the secret is not knowing but doing it consistently.
- Setting the right expectations with my team, peers, and partners is 60-70% of my job as a manager.
- Many asked me why I switched from programming to design.
- The best performers I saw at work are those who react and adapt quickly to changing environments or feedback. They usually ask one question.
- Performance management and career development conversations are hard to do if one doesn’t know what they really care about. And from my experience in working with others, most don’t know or are afraid to admit it to themselves.
- A helpful guide on what behaviors to start doing to increase your influence.
- Shishir Mehrotra’s (Coda, YouTube, Microsoft) PSHE model for evaluating talent from a podcast uploaded on YouTube (starts at 1:09:52, runs for several minutes). I mentioned the model when we discussed how seniority levels differs in the skills needed to perform the job. In short, the next level job is relatively similar to the previous one except for the small group of jobs in the middle of the progression (from senior execution to early leadership positions) where one has to change their skill set dramatically and mindset.