Why you should repeat yourself

November 01, 2021

#61 – November 01, 2021

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If you’re part of a management team, repeating yourself is a key to success.

We all have been in a meeting with a team discussing a challenge in the project. One of the engineers has strong opinions and loudly shares ideas. Around the end, it looks like people start to accept the engineer's ideas. To confirm everyone agrees, the leader repeats the suggestion and asks if there are any objections. Silence appears—that awkward silence. The leader waits for five seconds while thinking that there is a consensus. The words fell from the leader's lips while thinking everyone agreed: "Well, it looks like that's how we are gonna solve this problem."

Ask an executive “do you think we should optimize for keeping people busy?”

Whenever a new development technology is announced I'm usually near the front of the queue to try it out. Over recent years this has included things like Durable Functions, Kubernetes, Dapr, Tye, Pulumi, Blazor, etc, etc. I like to dive in deep and try them out, often while they're still in pre-release to evaluate whether they would be useful for my own projects. Out of that I'll often blog about my findings and sometimes do conference or user group sessions.

It’s very difficult question to answer. How do you judge a leader? Is it financial success? The loyalty they engender? Their ability to inspire? There are war-time leaders and peace-time leaders. Leaders may be understated or zealous. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to say definitively what constitutes a great leader. Regardless, we all want to improve our ability to lead, whether it’s a small team or a Fortune 500. But how?

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