During a previous job I spent a lot of time working with delivery teams on other continents, helping them develop software. I was lucky enough to visit them on several occassions for a week at a time, and whilst I was there made lots of progress working with the on-site developers. Unfortunatley I was not able to stay on-site for the duration of the project and so needed to find other ways of collaborating with the teams remotely from back in the UK. ...
In my last blog post, I looked at situational leadership and how different influencing styles and techniques can be effective in different contexts with people at different levels of maturity. ‘Push’ (directive) influencing techniques are more focused on “telling” whereas ‘Pull’ (non-directive) techniques tend to involve the use of questions and reflection to guide. One particular technique involving the use of questions to influence in this way is Socratic questioning. Socratic questioning is a practice adapted from the Socratic method to stimulate critical thinking. It involves systematic questioning to explore ideas, critically analyse logic and consider broader perspectives. It is frequently used in education and psychological therapy. ...
Traditionally people used to think leadership was an inherent quality and that individuals have their own distinct leadership style. In practice, each style has its own strengths and weaknesses, situations where it excels and others where it is less effective. Therefore, whilst it is natural to have a preferred style that one feels most comfortable with, a good leader should be able to adapt their style depending upon the situation or context, the team or individual being influenced and the task at hand. This is called Situational Leadership. ...
I am really enjoying programming in Google’s Go language (Golang for search engines) but very occasionally come across things that aren’t really possible, or considered idiomatic, in Go. Go is a very opinionated language which is a good thing as it keeps the language and tool chain very simple but also means if you need to do something unusual, it can sometimes feel like you are fighting the language. One example of this is developing plugins. ...
This is the start of my new blog. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time but somehow never quite got around to. Part of the problem for me was choosing a blogging platform and tool chain - I was overwhelmed by the number of different options available. I know lots of people use platforms like Wordpress but I always liked the idea of static generators like Jekyll. ...