designfrontier.net: Daniel Sellers, code, culture, other stuff
This last Sunday we went on a light hike with my mother-in-law who is in the process of converting her Ford Transit into a small camper van. Part of the process is cutting a hole in the roof to install a vent fan to keep air moving and keep it cool in the summer. As you can imagine It’s a bit intimidating to take a drill and a saw, climb on the roof of your new van, and cut away a section of it.
As we were walking she told me she was grateful that I always tell her she can do it. Whether it was cutting a hole in her van’s roof, or learning to drive her pickup truck and trailer. She said it always made her feel like she could do it, that she could accomplish something that she didn’t think she could.
Now, before you start thinking this is all about me, let me pull a couple of important leadership lessons from this conversation, because they are broadly applicable, and I use them every day while leading engineering teams.
Encourage them to go big, to step into something that they aren’t fully comfortable with. One way to think about any kind of growth is as a series of calculated risks. You don’t get better at riding a bike by just pedaling along on your Peloton. You’ll get stronger, but strength isn’t the only skill needed to ride bikes well. To get better you have to push just a little beyond your current skill level, until that becomes your new skill level.
