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You have made it to a position of engineering leadership for a host of reasons. Chief amongst them is, no doubt, your ability to come up with good ideas; so you should continue being the one who comes up with the great ideas now you’re in a leadership role. Well – maybe sometimes, but generally not.
I’m an engineering leader with a few years experience of providing technical leadership to multiple teams, and my biggest weakness is a tendency to evangelise my great ideas to teams before they’ve even had a chance to consider the problem I’m trying to solve.
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.
You will come away from this talk aware of some natural behaviours that you may not even be aware that you are doing that, rather than bringing out the best ideas, unconsciously serves to suppress them by biasing people to your solution.
