Reflection is the key ingredient for self-growth, this is a known fact. However, I figured out I need to be careful and consider several factors.
There are different types of reflection. I noticed, until now, these two types:
The type that stimulates self-growth.
The self-destructive type.
My mind jumps often from one type to another. Often I catch myself in the self-destructive type, as I have a very strong achiever mentality and a very loud, perfection focused inner critic. It is sometimes a challenge, to calm down my spiraling mind, but I am getting better at it. This needs constant practice.
However, I also have to take care of not investing too much time in reflection, as this is actually using the present to think about the past, which can diminish the time I invest in planing and steering my future.
Parts of what follows grew out of several older posts I wrote on different topics that, at first glance, did not seem to belong together. Looking back, I realized they were circling around the same question from different angles. To prevent repetition I pulled them from the blog. I thought about deleting them, but decided to try and rewrite them. I played around with the local AI support in Brainiac and synthesized the bigger picture from those posts. As it seems, it came out pretty nice. It follows the ideas from the original posts, but is partly also very “intellectual” 🙂.
In education, in technology, at work, and even in private life, systems tend to drift away from what builds long-term capability, resilience, and alignment. Instead, they optimize for what is easier to reward, easier to explain, or simply more attractive in the short term.
Have a look at what your team is working on, are you producing real future proof value for the company or just chasing another tech trend trying to show that you are „on the bleeding edge“?
Producing real value doesn’t just help your company keep the business in long term, it gives your team purpose and enables them to optimize their contribution.
A couple of days ago I was going to the office. It was Friday, I had some meetings scheduled and some light office tasks to do. All in all, it should be an easy day as it was the first working week of the year.
As I was walking from the car park to the office, I noticed a guy walking in front of me. He was strolling along, with a coffee in his hand and looking kind of dreamy. Unintentionally I set off to overtake him and hurry along my way.
Then it hit me: “Why am I in a hurry?”. As I wrote above, there is no urgent meeting that I needed to attend or a task I had to do. Where did this urge to overtake him and look busy come from?
The modern life being promoted around us, teaches us not to loose time and to always be busy. If we are not, then we will not be successful, reach our goals or we will simply be brand-marked as slackers.
But this time I intentionally chose to stop my overtaking and match the speed of a dreamy looking guy. Our lives are marathons, not sprints. Preserve your energy for the moments where you really need them.
This year the company did their bi-annual Employee Survey powered by Gallup. As we did this 2 years ago, my team's results were among the lowest ranking. But this time the Employees Engagement Index went up significantly. I was rated very good by the people I lead concerning my leadership skills and they showed way higher engagement values than comparable teams.
So what led to this improvement?
This post closes a series of reflections written at different points during my first tenure as a team lead — after roughly six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 months, 30 months, and now 48 months. Each text captures a moment in time, written without knowing what would come next.
I’m intentionally leaving the earlier posts unchanged. Not because they are complete, but because they reflect the questions, uncertainties, and partial clarity that tend to accompany leadership in real life. Read together, they don’t form a guide — they form a trajectory.
If you’re new to leadership or approaching it for the first time, consider this series less as advice and more as field notes from different distances to the same starting point.
As a manager one of my tasks is to do yearly performance evaluations of the employees in my team.
I take this very seriously, as although I speak regularly with my people about tasks and behaviors, this yearly review gives me time to pause and reflect deeper about the stuff I (and the company) find important and how does the employee measure against that.
During the year I keep notes of all 1:1 meetings we have and also of stuff that happens between them that catch my eye, positive as well as possible improvement points. During the yearly review preparations, I sit down and go thru all the notes in order to consolidate the feedback I want to give to the employee.
So it's about 30 months now since I took over building and leading an engineering team.
Building is the right word, as on the first day I started there was no team. There were just 2-3 engineers in India, that started doing some testing in the last sprint and had absolutely no clue what they are doing. (Somebody told them they are the test team and that the software to test is in Artifactory …)
Something over 18 months ago a big change happened in my work life. After years of trying, learning, searching for ways forward, changing jobs on the same level … I was appointed team leader in my company and tasked with building up a team completely from scratch. I already wrote on the topic several times, this is a follow up.
Had a strange discussion the other day in the project. We had a Release Meeting and my team was showing the current state of testing, defects and so on. During the presentation I intentionally said to the Defect Manager, that she should highlight in the Dashboard how long bugs are open in our product (we have a couple of them dragging on for more then 6 months). Of course this caught my managers eye.