Hola todos,
I’m told that Physics explains why time passes faster as you age which is useful to know as I reflect how quickly last week passed me by. For the record, I’m no spring chicken.
How was it for you?
Thank you to Hendrik Esser for providing us with our final Lockdown Learnings interview.
Through these difficult days, this series of interviews has been a privilege for us to record as a range of tech leaders disclosed their personal and professional thoughts on lockdown and much else.
As we (hopefully) start to emerge from lockdown we’ve decided to bring this series to an end but will start a new batch of interviews later this year, with a different format and more amazing guests.
This weeks newsletter looks at empathy in leadership and why long term planning is a great tool for your personal and professional development.
Until next time, stay safe and be kind.
Andrew Weaver
[email protected]
Hendrik joined us from Aachen and delivered a wonderful interview full of good humour and experienced insight.
He joined Ericsson Germany in 1994 as a SW developer before moving through the company through project management, project office management, portfolio and technology management towards being the “COO” of one of Ericsson’s large development units.
In 2008 he was a key driver to the agile transition of Ericsson and became a strong contributor to the international agile community.
Watch the interview with Hendrik here.
You might also find interesting a presentation that Hendrik delivered at Agile India 2019 covering Mindset & Culture.
¨Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care¨ – Theodore Roosevelt
A consistent theme within these interviews is that empathy and emotional intelligence are key attributes for effective leadership.
We have talked in the past about the need to Manage With Compassion so this article on Why Empathy Matters In Leadership struck a chord and is worth a read.
Perhaps you’re one of those for whom empathy isn’t a natural skill set. You’d like to be more empathetic but, “it’s just not in me”.
Well you might be in luck with the development of Emotion AI as this MIT article explains, “Emotion AI is a subset of artificial intelligence (the broad term for machines replicating the way humans think) that measures, understands, simulates, and reacts to human emotions. It’s also known as affective computing, or artificial emotional intelligence”
Hang around long enough and you might be able to rely on machines for all your EI requirements.
Whilst many sectors are suffering from a severe economic shock wave and having to batten down their costs and weather the storm, some are booming and none more so than in health.
Healthcare jobs are booming and in HealthTech there are some companies emerging who might be unique in looking back at 2020 as a stellar year.
Here in Spain the economy is forecast to take a particularly brutal hit with worst decline in GDP since the Civil War >80 years ago but one sector seemingly doing well is Health Tech.
This recent article from Sifted, 20 Spanish Healthtech companies to watch, looked at a booming HealthTech space where biq acquisitions and new funding sources are fuelling significant growth.
Our coaching assignments generally cover two topics.
1. Immediate management support and guidance
2. Career planning and execution
With the latter we are great believers in setting yourself a clear plan on the why, how, when.
We have discussed before the need to understand your purpose, to have meaning and flow to your career.
We’re also advocates for the planning and visualisation of what you’d like your future self and future life to look like.
Debbie Millman’s ‘Remarkable Life’ exercise is an interesting and popular process for setting a longer term vision. In it she recommends writing out a day in your life, 10 years ahead. Drilling down into the tiniest of details about what that day looks, feels and smells like.
She claims a huge success rate on herself and others achieving exactly the lifestyle they visualised for themselves.
If you’re in need of structure for your career planning, it’s a useful read.
If you’d like to discuss your career planning and/or visualisation in more detail then book in a free exploratory session with one of our team.
We’ve had quite a few recent requests from members wanting us to go into more detail about some of the existing topics and lectures.
As a result and during the summer, we will be adding further insight, links, interviews and content to the existing course material.
We will keep you posted but please do get in touch with us if there’s anything you’d like to see more or indeed less of, as we continue to build out the quality of the content available on our management skills courses.
Email : [email protected] with any requests, comments, feedback.
Two books were chosen by Hendrik Esser during his interview with CTO Academy.
The first is The Leaders Guide to Radical Management;
“Stephen Denning is one of the most articulate and honest critics of the limitations of current management techniques and practices. Beyond criticism he is also able to offer creative alternative management methods and sound logic for his suggestions.
This is one of the most original pieces of management thinking to be published in some time. It offers a new contextual perspective for management and along with Umair Haques’ The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business is required reading for anyone involved in the practice of offering advice or consulting to business leaders.The era of maximizing shareholder value has cost us a lot, it is time to turn our attention to the creation of real value¨
The Leaders Guide To Radical Management
The 2nd of Hendrik’s choices is Freedom From The Known;
“Krishnamurti will stretch your mind like malleable clay. It’s not certain if your mind goes back to where it was before this happens. If you really digest what he’s saying (and it’s not easy to do so in most cases) it will expand the way you think of yourself and the world around you”
90 Things You Need To Know To Become an Effective CTO
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