Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're signing in from. It's Kumar Dattatreyan again with Agile Meridian, and with me today is a guest. Of course, a guest. This is a podcast, and that's what we do. We interview guests. And today, our guest is Steve Kury. Steve Kury was a UI developer who is now involved in product management and leadership. He started out as a multimedia developer in the late nineties. After that, he went to the College of William and Mary, where he earned his MBA in marketing. After that, he came back into UI development on enterprise-level systems, started weaving marketing into his work, and moved towards product management, where he, most recently, contributed to 3 federal health care related systems as a product owner and a manager. He attributes his success more to general leadership than to any particular hard skill. Recently, he's been giving talks on leadership and developing leadership, with his general presentation being titled "Developing Your Sphere of Influence." So, without further ado, I'm gonna invite Steve to the stage here. Hi, Steve. How are you doing today? Good or otherwise, Kumar.
Thank you for having me. Of course. I like the picture in your background. I like the image that it evokes, that leadership is something that you build, and not something that necessarily you're born with. Would you comment on that?
I would certainly be happy to comment on that. I think that leadership very much is something that's built. And even for the people who are naturally born at it, they're born with the sensibilities and capacities, but they still have to have it built over time with coaching and mentoring, feedback as they grew up and they grow into it with opportunities to do it. So, in that sense, it's really built with them. But I will tell you a point that I would like to impart to you and all our viewers here. I think that quite a few people have the basic capacity for building leadership for themselves. They may not end up being the earth-moving leaders like, say, Martin Luther King and Bill Clinton. But they still have the general capacity, by that I mean emotional intelligence, to develop the basics of it that they need, which is more than enough for their purposes, such as managing a team of 5 or 6 people at work and a handful of stakeholders. And that's not like what Bill Clinton does, but it's all that they need to do. They probably have enough to do that. So, yes, I would say that it's built.
Excellent. So let's delve into your journey and how you've built your leadership skills over time. My first question really is, earlier in your career in the nineties - this is kind of where my career started as well, in the nineties - you mentioned working in multimedia. But really, I'm more interested in your experience with the disruption that you must have faced when the tech bubble burst. Right? So the 90s, early 2000s tech bubble that burst, how did you adapt and innovate after that disruption, if you will?
Well, with the tech bubble bursting, that was a downer for an awful lot of people, including myself, because I felt like I had something going good at the time, and I could see more possibilities arising, and that sort of got squashed. For myself, I knew that to really advance myself, it was rather more going into hardcore engineering for business and management. And people had always said, "Well, Steve, I mean, alright, I shall say I've gotten the feedback that my way of thinking lends up more to business and management than it did engineering." That's the direction I wanted to go into. At the time, it was a rough economy, kinda like it is now for some people. And I would say that if I go back to business school, I'm not really giving anything up, so there's not a lot of an opportunity cost. So I decided to go back to school. I was able to get into the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and so I went for that program where I concentrated in marketing, learning all about that and what it really entails, because I've heard a lot of people talk about marketing in different ways, whether it's advertising, communicating, getting the message out, or what is it? I wanted to really get to the heart of the whole thing. So I thought that was a worthy area of study for myself, which it was. And going back to school like I did there, I got to really get into marketing. Also, with the program, they really focused on a quantitative approach, so I really got into statistics and data analytics. This is where I gained a really solid understanding and appreciation for what data analytics really meant at the time, even though it's much more of a science now than it was then. But still, having a sense of analytics and how to work with the numbers was a very key thing. And with that, and also getting some basic introductions as to what leadership meant, it got me started thinking like that. And that made me adapt, and that brought me in, I'm going in this general direction.
That's great. It seems like a really good and useful transition for the rest of your career, right? Getting an MBA in marketing, learning more on the data sciences, things like that. That seems like that was a good move on your part, the education that you received. How would you say that marketing and the data sciences have changed since you earned your MBA?
That's a pretty good question. I gotta take a moment on that one. I would say that when you look at what data science is today, what the quantitative approach is that a lot of software companies, and internet software companies in particular, are taking to maximize their online products, it's still not a situation like in the old days. Like, in the nineties, software was distributed and sold on a CD-ROM where you bought a copy of it and you had it for yourself. Now that it's online, everybody accesses it as they want to, you're more likely to get a subscription to it than buy it for yourself. And the company that's making it is able to get feedback on what they're doing and upgrade the experience and try a lot of experimentation with things like A/B testing, more multivariate testing to find different ways to optimize the product and the experience where they can have a better sales experience and also, you might say, acquire as much market share as they can. Those things have really advanced since then. And this was giving me a real appreciation for that and what it does, and I feel like I have a lot of the foundations coming into that in the first place.
No, that's great. And I think you're right. I mean, the basic premise hasn't changed much, but the amount of data that we have access to certainly has, and the ability to slice and dice the data and really glean information that we wouldn't have access to 20 years ago, especially with AI helping us along the way, right? Training these large language models on all of the data allows us to be a little bit more predictive in terms of how people behave or how they might behave from a marketing aspect. The basic business premise really hasn't changed. Running any business and marketing for that business hasn't changed. It's all the same basic things. It's just how it's done today. It seems like it's changed a lot. It's really advanced quite a bit.
Alright. Let's move it along. So you transitioned - you tried to transition into marketing, right, with your MBA, but I believe in our last interview, you found it challenging. What were the obstacles that you faced, and what led you to return to the tech field?
That's a pretty good question. That's a question I am glad to answer, in hopes that there are those people who might be able to learn from my experience, not necessarily have to repeat it for themselves. I'd initially been a software developer. And before school, I had to work in a freelance capacity, which I mean I could take on clients and projects as they came my way if I decided to pursue them and work with them, which is a really great thing. And when I lived in the Bay Area in California, that's how a lot of people did work. They were working as freelance individuals, being self-employed, marketing themselves, which I was just starting to get comfortable with at the time, by the way. And I could tell, I mean, I've discussed projects for clients in coffee shops. But I found that after business school, a lot of the companies that I was very interested in were very traditional in their hiring practices. They really wanted to see a specific profile. They wanted to see a business undergrad degree, a couple of years working in the corporate experience, which is similar to what they were doing - going to school and coming back and moving along in the same vein. And I find that with a different assortment of jobs before I came to school, it didn't really match that. And freelance wasn't seen in the same way. Maybe some people say, "Well, that really means you were attempting, trying to get jobs." No, it wasn't. It means I was trying to do individual projects with me, but I didn't have the chance to explain that. And I found that different companies didn't really take it now. So after I did some odd jobs around the Harrisburg area trying to reach out and set this up, I had actually spoken to different alumni of my program, all of whom said the same thing separately. "Steve, the technologies that you worked with and the communication protocols such as XML and JSON and so on are getting to be much more commonplace on the enterprise level. If you work with that, it might be good for you to try to revitalize that and come back and do that and see where you can jump around to once you did the work." And I found that to be the case, so I brushed back up on that, got back into work, and things took off for me then, and I definitely had some progress.
No, that's fantastic. So, experimenting with the marketing degree that you had, not really finding success there because of the barriers to that. But then you pivoted. You dealt with that disruption and pivoted, and then you went back to your roots. And you found work there, and you were successful at it. So tell me about your experience. With your first opportunity to maybe lead a team, how did that work out? And what did you learn from that?
Well, that was a great opportunity, by the way. And it really says, I hired into this company in New York City called High 5 Games. They were an online casino gaming company, and they were very - I thought they were very exceptional in that they were a really creative powerhouse. They actually had art workers they pulled in from Madison Avenue advertising entities, and they did some very creative games with creative design. And I hired in. And about 9 months after I hired into the company, my boss, Michael Bowen, he called me and said, "Steve, so far, you've generally been a step ahead of me before I wanted something done. You're always ahead of it. I like that, and you've done very well working with the people that you've worked with so far. We decided that we're going to make you a project leader, and we're gonna give you the desktop platform user interface system to manage and lead yourself. Well, we're gonna work on some other budding projects that we wanna do. I think you can take this on." I said, "Well, I think I could take it on too." So I took that on from there, and I had his backing to pretty much reach out to anybody I needed to in the company to make a variety of enhancements and fixes happen. So I didn't have a formal team that anybody would say, "This is your team," but I had the usual people that I reached out to, like an art director, other art directors, localization specialists, UX designers, as well as the back-end developers and so on. And with these people, I was able to do some work. I don't really have an actual account, but I'm figuring between 23-26 enhancements for the system.
That's pretty impressive. So even without an official team per se, you were able to lead a group of people to really deliver tons of value over the course of the time that you were there. What would you say? And how would you define this group of people that you led? Would you say they were a team, or what was the quality about them and your relationship with them that allowed them to be as productive as they were?
Well, like I said, this was not a formal team. I don't think they were organized as a team. It's just that these are the people in every different department in the company that I needed to pull in to make things happen. One thing that I was set up well for coming and working in this company, I would say, is nothing new with people coming in - some of the younger guys with computer science degrees coming from a multimedia background. I was used to working with all kinds of different people. I'd always done well with graphic designers, producers, video editors, as well as other developers in the systems that I worked on. That was nothing new to me. So stepping into this was almost like going back in time 10 years where I could just talk and work with different people, and this is what I really liked most about it. It was a very multidisciplinary environment, and I got to work with people and be creative with them. I'm trying to understand what they think they can do. They tell me what they could do to contribute to it, and we'd make agreements and work with it. And after I met with everybody involved in any particular enhancement, I could finalize my thoughts for what I wanted to do with it. If I needed their buy-in on it, I would go get it, come back and say, "This is what I want to do and I appreciate the insights." So I really let people be creative and give me their ideas and work with them, because they could tell me more about what they could do than I could tell them.
That sounds fantastic. You were able to get this group of people with vastly different skill sets, and because of your experience, your past experience, mold them into a functioning whole. This actually evokes a memory from my talk with Colin O'Neill last week. We talked about his concept of fusion teams. And the fusion team concept is one where it's a multidisciplinary, cross-functional team. That was in his model, the ever model, where he talks about how these teams, because they're cross-functional and cross-disciplinary, they have all the - again, it's not a new concept, certainly. But I think he was talking more about formal teams that are cross-functional and cross-disciplinary working together for some period of time. They are formally - they sort of go through the whole stages of team building: the forming, norming, storming, performing stages. And they end up being this really high-performing team because of that. How would you contrast or maybe point out some similarities to your experience with teams in general?
I appreciate you asking that because I did listen to your podcast last week. And I liked it, and I identified with a fair amount of it. He was - I believe he said he was one of the original people involved in developing the Scaled Agile Framework. I thought that was very impressive right there, and I appreciated it because I've been involved with two Scaled Agile Framework projects myself. And I think part of this is - I forgot exactly how he said it, but as an aspect of SAFe, the productivity and innovation will be maximized by teams of people who really have their boots on the ground. These are the people that are really involved with the customers and using the product itself, because they're going to see upfront what the opportunities are to do something different and innovative, maybe even disruptive, like you said. But they're going to see the opportunities to do these things, and we need to be able to let them make these decisions for themselves and just do it. Part of that is letting them - if they see an opportunity, unless there's something really risky about it, let them just do it rather than having to say, "We have this feedback," take it back and feed it back up the chain of command from people at the top of the program to tell them to come up with decisions and feed them back to them. Let them do it because they're the ones who are really involved with it.
And when I saw this, I was thinking, "I like that a lot," and I agree with that because that's part of what I did. I sort of gave you some insight into how I did that there at High 5 Games. But ultimately, I said one thing he pointed out was you have to empower these people to make the decisions for themselves. And something I wanted to answer for you is, well, that's great. Now the question is, how do you empower them to do it? How do you go about empowering a team?
I've heard a lot of people talk about why you need teams who are empowered. But I never really hear them say, "Well, how do you go about empowering the team or anybody in particular?" So I actually have a couple of thoughts for that I'd like to share with you. One, you want to coach them on leadership and raise the internal LQ of the team. By LQ, I mean leadership quotient, much like the emotional intelligence and emotional quotient. You want to raise that for the team so they can become self-directed and engage themselves. You really want to get them doing the thinking for themselves. And a key aspect of this is owning the outcomes that they're working towards for themselves. They're not just doing the work under some direction, but they're owning it for themselves and being as self-directed as you can let them be. And a key aspect of this is - and I am reading a thought here - they refine and estimate their sprint stories in SAFe for their own benefit as well as the client's. And here's the key thing: it's not just that they're doing the job of refining it, getting through the work, getting it done, and saying, "We're done." But I want them to own the outcome here for themselves in terms of their own comfort zone doing the work and their own reputation as a team, because this makes a difference for them.
So I want them to ensure that their estimates will give them a reasonable comfort zone to work in. As I can guarantee you, Murphy's Law will rear its ugly head once in a while when it gets the chance. Either something will come up in the project which they didn't estimate and plan for that could blow a timeline, or something will be needed that they just weren't thinking of at the time, because when you're making estimations, you're making it in a limited period of time with limited knowledge at that time.
Also, I would want to develop a rapport with each of these individuals. If I'm the leader of the product and with them, I want to have a rapport with each of these people where I can understand and cater to their ambitions as best I can. Because once they feel that their ambitions matter and they matter, and I'm going to try to cater to them and give them one-off projects and do things to put them in a spot to really do the things they wanted to and stretch themselves with, they'll feel empowered that they really matter, and they can grow with the experience to go in the direction they want to.
And with this, any leader should make themselves available to the team for any questions. Don't just push them off. So as they have a question, here's what they need answers to, and when they have that, they want to have some rapport about that they can reach out to you when they have a question. And with all this, really, a good leader should respect those decisions and let the team get comfortable doing it and get good at it.
I think those are all super important points. Empowerment is a relationship. It's not a one-way street. And when someone joins a company, they come into the company empowered. They're empowered. They make the decision to apply. They make the decision to say, "This is a company I want to work for. I'm going to apply here. I'm going to submit my resume. I want this job." And so it's all of their own volition. And of course, the company then makes a decision on which one of the people that applied to the job they're going to pick and hire for the purpose of doing the work that they applied for.
The moment that person is hired, the power balance shifts. In one way, I'm empowered to apply for the job. I'm not empowered to make the decision whether I get hired or not. I have to show my mettle, show my worth to the hiring manager, and the hiring manager has the power at that point in time. The power balance has shifted. And as soon as I'm hired, it's still shifted. The power imbalance is still there. I'm just an employee. I'm not empowered to make any decisions as an employee in that company in regards to the work. I'm waiting to see the signs as to what decisions I can make as a new employee in the company.
And for companies that are well run with strong leaders - and when I say strong leaders, I don't mean people that are going to tell that new employee what to do, but strong in the sense as you described it, leaders with empathy, with EQ, with a leadership quotient - they are going to do everything they can to tilt the balance of power back in favor of this new employee and make sure that they feel that they are empowered to make decisions. Maybe not every decision, because they're brand new, but this is where leaders need to apply situational leadership. If the person is very experienced, they have tons of experience in the field that he or she was hired for, but low drive, then that leader has to take a slightly different tack in leading this person, be more of a coach, be more of a mentor, to help them improve the balance of power between leader and employee.
And eventually, you want the leader to just support the employee, support their growth. And that's kind of what I got from what you're saying. So it's a two-way street. Would you agree with that?
I think I would definitely agree with that. And if I understood you correctly, I think what you're referring to is also what's called servant leadership, where you can build them up, you can empower them, and be there just to give the team and your team players what they need as they need it, but really stay out of their way and give it to them when they need it. And I think that is pretty key.
Yeah. Servant leadership, situational leadership. Situational leadership is applying the right leadership style for the situation. So if the employee is brand new, they're inexperienced, they're fresh out of college, they may need a different style of leadership. They may not be ready to take on the responsibility that you want to give them, empower them with. And so for an employee like that, as a leader, you might need to be more directive to show them the way before they can do it themselves.
It's almost like that Shu-Ha-Ri model. The Shu model is where you're demonstrating how to do the work or the moves in taekwondo or whatever it might be. The Ha is where now the student has mastered most of the moves, can do them just as well as the teacher can. And the Ri is where they're empowered. They can make up their own moves, as long as the outcomes are understood, they own their work. They own it. And so servant leadership certainly has a part to play in that, but it can't be a leader's only style of leadership because it doesn't fit with every situation.
I agree with you that leadership has to be situational. There is a time and place where you need to back off, be a servant leader and do what we've been talking about. But in other cases with new people coming in recently out of school over the past few years, maybe you have to be more hands-on and directive with them, one, to help get through the project that needs to be done because they're not at the point yet to make these decisions for themselves. But also they need to learn the power that they have and what they can do so you can get them to the point where you can let them do it. So you have to start off getting more hands-on and directive. And as you expose them to how to do things, you can downplay your own direction on them and let them increase their direction. And of course, these are some of the differences that go from, say, being an associate software developer to a full software developer to a senior developer over time. And I think that's fair to say.
Certainly, there's career progression and levels and things like that, but those titles are reflective of a person's experience, their knowledge, and their ability to put that experience and knowledge into practice. And they're useful. It sort of allows employees to progress on a career track.
We're going to shift a little bit here and focus back on your learnings over your career. I know you worked on some large programs using agile, specifically Scaled Agile, and in some cases, you weren't given the best teams to work with. Not that they were bad people, they just weren't functioning well as teams. So, how did you work with them? How did you get them to turn their ship around, if you will?
Well, one project that I'm thinking of in particular that plays to your question there was really my first Scaled Agile project. I came down to Maryland right before the pandemic started. And I worked with another company, Manta International, on a large project, a Scaled Agile project for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This is the federal agency that's really healthcare-driven. And on this program, it was a large-scale agile program with 10 development teams of different sorts. And also there was a UX design team which worked with the other teams and so on. There were a lot of interdependencies between the teams.
And I was asked to take on a team, which really basically was the lowest performing team on the program at that point. They had been consistently delivering 30% of their sprint commitments every 2 weeks. And this was bringing a lot of pressure down on them. The situation was chaotic in the first place. And they had some problems with the last product interview for me, but I'm not going to go into those details right now. That's not the important part. They've been run down. They were very stressed out, and it was a hard situation for them.
The deputy program manager basically had some talk with me and said, "The key thing I need you to do, Steve, is figure out what's going wrong and bring it up because we can't keep on going like this." And as I looked at it, as I tried to understand what was going on, I decided I would just give them what I thought they needed to have rather than going through the hairy situation of sorting out what did happen and what led to it.
And what I did was basically a lot of what I already laid out for you. I gave them a new estimation skill for estimating their work in their system, their refinement sessions, which I thought was more appropriate and fitting to meeting a customer commitment. Meaning commitments to a third-party stakeholder group of stakeholders, rather than just being an internal team for the company, where you can go above or below and learn over time. But we really had to be meeting these commitments and making them happy because that's very key. And I'll tell you one thing - if the federal government isn't happy with you, they're gonna let you know.
And with that, I also took the time to actually say, let them know that I wanted them to start owning the outcome for themselves as well as for the client. Understand that I want you to ensure that you're giving yourself good estimates that you can be comfortable with. I want you to be able to know that Murphy's Law is going to come in and crawl up your leg and bite you a little bit. You're going to forget something. Things will come up, but you have to have the comfort rule in your estimates that you can cover these things. And that's all good because that's part of business. That's not a lack on your part in the estimation or as a developer or anybody. Things are always going to come up that you weren't expecting, so you have to have some wiggle room for those when they come.
But I also, aside from that, met with each one of them and tried to understand who they were, understand who had interest in leadership and management as compared to being more hands-on with a technical track. I allowed one team lead who really didn't like being a team leader to back up and then just go hands-on because he didn't like doing it. And I also don't want a leader trying to be a leader if he doesn't want to be a leader. He doesn't feel it. He shouldn't be there doing it.
And as one example, I had another developer who really had ambitions for becoming an architect. I made it a point to introduce him to the program architect who was very positive about it because he likes helping people out, and he gave him a half-hour session once a week to discuss the architecture issues with the program, learn how to be an architect himself so he could grow a little bit.
I think if I deal with these few examples, those things I did with other people, I could cater to their ambitions and let them feel like this situation is going to work with them as well as it is for the client, more so than just getting the paycheck.
I love it. And this description that you just gave of your experience there is really a master class in leadership. Because it has all the elements of what a leader should be doing for their team. Helping them reach their potential, helping them find the kind of work that they are most passionate about. So for the team lead that didn't want to do that work, it was hearing them, just hearing what they want to do and providing opportunities for them to do that type of work. For people that did want more responsibility, it's providing opportunities to do that kind of work.
So, for those of you listening to the show, think about the opportunities that are in front of you to lead others, whether you have the title or not. And I think that will be my next question for you, Steve, and maybe the last question, the last couple of questions, is really how do you lead with influence? And in your case, you have influence - you have the title. I should say you have the title, but you built the influence. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, you can correct me if I'm wrong, people followed you and were able to reach their potential because of the influence you had on them, not so much the title that you had on them. Would you care to comment on that?
I would certainly share a comment on that, and I think it's an excellent question. There are some things that I think are worth noting with this. One, I think it's easier if you have the title with it too. And at least in the program as we did it, the product owners like I was were all management representatives on the teams. So we were actually considered part of the program management, not just an individual contributor on the team.
But with that, I also enjoy doing things like this. I enjoy talking with people about what they do, learning about the different things that people do, seeing them get happy with it. And basically, I like seeing people grow because I remember back to the days when I didn't have anybody showing that interest to me. But there were those people who ultimately did. And that made all the difference to me, and they explained to me back then the importance of leadership - helping people grow and doing these things when some people have it and some people don't. And having learned from this firsthand and been on the receiving end of having and not having it, I like doing it and paying it forward.
But I also know that this is how you get the most out of people. And if you don't do it, you're not getting - I agree. And I think when I go into a company and I sit in a meeting, I almost immediately know who the influencers are. It's not - and then they may be leaders also, but not always. Sometimes the people that have the most influence don't have the title, but people listen when they talk, and those people are the true leaders in that group, in that setting, in that situation because they're respected. People are listening to what they have to say because what they have to say has substance. And so that's just from my experiences. I'm sure you've seen the same sorts of things in your experience.
Alright. Last question, unless there's something that I haven't asked, what is your next - what's next for you, Steve?
Good question. It hasn't actually landed in front of me yet, so I can't tell exactly what it is. But if I had my druthers, and if I did, I'd love to be seeing myself in a lead product manager role on some sort of, obviously, a software and IT development program, possibly in healthcare where I can leverage my previous experience. One, because I enjoy working with healthcare. I mean, I like the ability to contribute to the common good of America and someone - everybody needs healthcare. And if I could get through that, it makes me feel good. But also I feel like I can make a real contribution to it.
And something I'd like to do if I could get into a company is basically start a leadership community of practice. I see a lot of agile, Scaled Agile, testing, development communities of practice for all sorts of things. I never hear about this for leadership where you can learn about more of it if you want to and have that interest. So I'd like to start that where I can meet different people in the company and try to set this up so that the people who are in leadership positions and those who want to learn would have, how should I say it, a common language for discussing it so they can help each other along and help coach each other and work at it because they have the same vocabulary to work with.
That's a wonderful set of goals that you laid out, especially resonates with me, creating some sort of leadership mastermind or community. Anything I have not asked you that you would like to share?
Let's see what I have here. I was trying to think of a few questions for you. Here's a question for you. What do you see as the shortfalls in leadership coaching and training currently from your client engagements and the places and people you've worked with?
I think that most people get promoted based on their ability to do their job, whatever the job was in the past. So, the best developer is going to get promoted to be a lead on the team, and the best architect will get promoted to be a lead architect or function in technology roles. And that - it doesn't matter if you're in marketing or technology or sales or whatever. Your performance in that role propels you to leadership positions. And to your earlier point, not everybody wants that.
However, lots of people will take it because it also means more money, more responsibilities that maybe they want, or maybe they don't want, but also it means more status within the company. And those things have a cost. And if you're not equipped to lead others, that cost can be significant on your mental health, on your team's mental health. It has a long tail. So it's not just the act of promoting someone to a role of leadership. It's the continued cost of promoting that person who isn't ready for that kind of a role.
So what I'd like to see - and there are some organizations that are very good at this - I'll tell you something. Early in my career, I used to run restaurants, and my first, when I went through school, I financed my school running restaurants pretty much. And my first job was at McDonald's, and McDonald's, they send you to McDonald's University to learn how to be a manager, a leader. And the program is fantastic. I was in my early twenties in Chicago and in their McDonald's University, but I wasn't learning how to make burgers. I was learning how to lead people, how to run a restaurant, how business operates, all these types of things that people go to business school for. And so more companies need to do that kind of thing.
And a lot of companies do. However, I think it could be better. I don't know what you think. It could be much better in teaching people, not only how to outwardly lead, but really learning more about themselves, about their emotional intelligence or lack of, about how, sort of shining a mirror on themselves, providing some coaching for the potential leader, the high performers in the company, so that they can learn more about themselves, shine a light on their blind spots so that they can be better leaders when given the opportunity. What are your thoughts?
I like a lot of what you're saying there. And these are things that I thought about myself. I mean, unfortunately, at least in technical companies like software, obviously, the companies need to promote new management and new managers to lead and manage development, and you need to keep that succession going. But for the developers that don't want to lead, I mean, it'd be good to have technical tracks to get them in, and more progressive companies do set up technical tracks for developers to go in if they don't want to be people leaders. They might be good thought leaders. They might be good at the technical work, but being people leaders isn't where they're at and they know that, and that's not what they want to do. So to give them the opportunity to work more in their technicalities and take the pressure off of them to go into management, where that's what you have to do to make the money, would be better for them and better for the company. That way you're leaving the management for the people who are really motivated to do that. Because you do need the people who want to advance into architecture and software design and all of these things in order to make that work.
Well, I always say that everyone is a leader in their own way. And I think that having training on leadership skills will benefit everyone, whether they're leading a team or not, because they still have the ability - people still have the ability to lead themselves and lead through influence. And those things cannot be more valuable to a person's career, whether they have aspirations to lead teams or lead departments or divisions or companies. Not everyone wants to be that, but still being able to have an impact on someone else is hugely rewarding. And I think everyone should have a taste of that, how to do that and how to do that well.
Alright. We're getting to the end of our time here. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on the show. It's been really a pleasure talking to you about your journey. And it is a journey. Life's a journey. And we've all gone through various disruptions in our lives. And it sounds like you have as well, and you've thrived through them. You've adapted. You've changed. And your career goals and aspirations have changed along with the times. So you're one of those adaptive, resilient people that can do that. And again, I think that's a great quality to have. So thank you again for being here. I appreciate you. And, thanks for watching everyone. If you have questions, Steve's information will be in the show notes, reach out to him. And to your earlier question about setting up a leadership community, I'm willing to resurrect that with some help. So we'll talk more later.
Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate the time, and we'll talk later.
Alright. Take care. Bye bye.
