Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once

In this talk, I will take you through uncertainty and its impact on our lives by looking at case studies from the cotton mill workers of 19th Century Britain to the fall of Nokia as the world's No. 1 phone maker and how change connects them both. Then, I will explore how the uncertainty of change can sometimes cause us to ignore, deny, distort, or even try to stop it from happening instead of working with it. 

But as is often the case in business, priorities constantly shift and where you focus your efforts will too. So how do you strike the right balance between working on the technical direction of the business and those tasks that require you to put your leadership hat on?

One of the toughest challenges you face as an engineering leader is staying current while preparing yourself and your teams for change.

In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.