I have been in a variety of technical leadership positions over the past decade before transitioning into people management in 2019. During my journey I’ve attended numerous formal leadership trainings, read dozens of books, and frequently studied online resources (The Enterprisers Project and Harvard Business Review are my favorites by the way). There is so much great content out there that can help you to become a better leader but it’s stressful and time consuming to find content that matters.

In my article “Five lessons learned on leadership in an Open Organization” I described my personal journey of moving into my first people management role at Red Hat. I also shared some of my best practices around leadership and approaches towards making a team successful in an Open Organization. Back then, I could not believe I would get harshly kicked out of my personal comfort zone so soon. Before I go there let me add some context. In the beginning of 2021 my team grew from seven to twelve members. This effectively meant that I needed to significantly decrease my time invested in making my associates successful. Then in April a colleague became sick and I was asked to take over the responsibility of another team with a rather different profile. And finally this team’s responsibilities had changed over the course of the year and were therefore mostly unclear.

I have been working in the IT business for over 16 years now and during that time I had the pleasure getting to know rather different companies. In the beginning I was part of a small 12 employee internet agency named Kingmedia, just before jumping into the enterprise world with IBM (which had about 300.000 employees) and the Open Source company Red Hat. Two years ago I also gave a real silicon valley startup named Docker a spin, where we had been around 500 people.