Refactoring your Leadership Style
If you type in “Leadership Style” to Google you’ll get back an awesome list of great infographics and pictures on all the components that should culminate into creating your leadership style.
Over the years I’ve broken down my own Leadership Style into the tenets I embraced as a developer to help me write code, ship code, and lead teams — Drive, Initiative, Delivery, and Leadership.
There is probably an infographic in there somewhere but one element that I’ve always subscribed to is thinking of leadership from a coding perspective and one of the most important elements in coding is refactoring.
Take the Hard Look
Refactoring your code is all about taking a step back to see how it is working, what it’s doing well, what it’s doing poorly, what’s breaking at scale, what’s horrible to figure out, what breaks under duress, etc, etc.
The list goes on and on, but what it boils down to is — “how do I make this thing that’s running pretty well even better” — when it comes to leadership you always need to be taking that look at yourself and your team. It’s not easy, who wants to always be asking themselves — “What could I be doing better?” — but remember you’re leading more than the Army of One, you’re leading the team of many and this introspection is what is going to help you figure out what they need to get better to grow and develop as leaders in their own right.
