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. Instead of rewriting those posts, I decided to keep them as they are and try to synthesize the bigger pattern here.
Over time, I started noticing the same pattern in very different areas of life.
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.
It‘s start of the year and time of dreaming about big goals we want to achieve this year. I tend to give myself too many, or too ambitious, goals. Then I either drive myself crazy to reach them, or the regular life gets to me and I get a bad feeling in the stomach because of „my failure“.
This year I‘ll just aim for consistency in healthy habits and things that give me joy, e.g. if my goal is regular running then I‘ll aim to go like 3 times a week but do not care about the speed or distance, or I’ll try to go fishing once a week even if it’s just a couple of hours etc.
I often read about people „living“ in their TODO list, meaning everything that comes to mind, is seen on the net, needs to be done someday (maybe), … gets jotted down and processed thru their productivity system. The purpose of this is to not forget anything and to live a quantified, but relaxed life, as everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.
Although I can relate to the „nothing gets forgotten“ part, because I need this to ease my mind, having everything I need to do in a day, week, … added to my TODO list, makes me feel like a machine and I actually feel psychological pressure to „get those tasks done“. I do not like it.
Every once in a while I fall down that rabbit hole and start filling my main.org with everything possible. But then at some point the list gets too long and I start feeling that pressure of still having „so many open tasks“ when the day is done. The only thing that helps then is to radically go thru the list and delete all the junk that is not 100% a real task, that has to get done, or a note which has value and shall be kept.
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.
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.
Now it has been a bit over 12 weeks since I took up new responsibilities, so time to give you an update what went on since the last post on this topic.
What I can already reveal is that it became easier to master a day at work and also some stuff started to fall in place :)!
6 weeks ago I took over my first job in management as a team lead in a big OEM car manufacturing company.
I worked for the last 14 years in different positions in testing, development and project management within the same company and did some 2 more years before that as an external HiL and In-Car tester for a different OEM. So I think it's safe to say, that I was a techie and now I became a boss.
I decided to write a blog post about my first 6 weeks into the transition, because I hope this will help me reflect on my experiences and sort the stuff in my head … and there is a lot :).