“How do I get a leadership position?”

I hear this question too often. It implies that leadership is a formal position. In fact, when I dig deeper I usually find that people equate leadership with management. They believe they have to be a manager to be a leader.

This is a really useful mental model. Although it was submitted to a joke book by a person named Robert J. Hanlon, it’s full of truth. For professional purposes I usually change the word “stupidity” to “ignorance.” I find the latter less pejorative than the former. 

It’s good to remember that we are all ignorant of many things. And that’s okay. It just means we’re human and have a lot to learn.

Also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are".

In the early 1930s, scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski wrote an important dictum, “The map is not the territory.” He observed that we often confuse our abstractions for the territory. “We confuse models of reality with reality itself.”

The Red Queen Effect mental model comes from Biology and evolution. Scientists hypothesized that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate to compete. They have to keep running just to stay in place. The name is a reference to the Red Queen character in Through the Looking Glass. After running in the forest a while, Alice observes that it seems like she hasn’t been moving at all.

The mental model of Comparative Advantage is drawn from economics. Here’s the basic idea: even if one country has workers that are more efficient and skilled at everything than the workers in another country, the more skilled country will still be better off by outsourcing some of the work to the other country.

Shuhari is a useful mental model to understand how people learn new skills. The idea is drawn from the Japanese martial art of Aikido, and it describes three stages people go through when learning a new skill: Shu, Ha, and Ri.

Chances are you’ve heard the word “culture,” and you may have talked about “culture fit” before; but, you probably don’t know what culture really is. Culture is shared beliefs, artifacts, behaviors, and language that represent a group of people. We all feel a deep sense of belonging when we understand and align with the beliefs, artifacts, behaviors, and language of a group of people. And achieving that sense of belonging is a powerful motivator.

Last week your director asked you to consider becoming the manager for your team, and you are worried about how that change will affect your relationships. Over and over you keep wondering: Will we stop being friends? Will they stop liking me if I’m their boss?

What if our organization is just like a garden, with all its living and non-living elements, each at the same time independent and interdependent? How would this inform the way leaders approach the challenge of building and maintaining an organization?

Every company says they have the best people. They don't. You don't. Nearly all have average people. Their accountants are average accountants. Their sales people are average sales people. Their software engineers are average software engineers... and so on...  

The next question in the survey was: “Given your responsibilities, how SHOULD you spend your time to provide the most value to the company and your team?” Here are the results based on 65 responses. 3 respondents were not in engineering roles.

When I coach software engineering executives and leaders one of the concepts we talk about is how they budget and spend their time. I ask them to allocate 100% of their work-focused time to four categories—IN, ON, AROUND, and AWAY. I wondered what they thought so I created a survey to learn more.

You need a knowledge investment strategy. Do you have one? If not, let me explain why you need one.

Why is it so hard for software engineering leaders to justify architectural improvements? When the CEO asks why you need to invest in upgrades, you can’t just say “trust me” and then get frustrated when your requests don’t get funded.

One of the skills you need to learn as a manager (and as a leader) is how to give tough feedback. I find it interesting that people have so much trouble doing it.

As a manager and leader, you coach. It’s a core skill. In fact, I’d suggest that if you can’t coach, you shouldn’t be a manager and you're not the most effective leader you can be for your organization.