Skip to main content

Experience or Leadership, what is more important

Look across your teams and the people you are trying to hire.  Where are you struggling?  Which teams look just like they did 2 years ago?  Which teams are excelling and providing the most value to your customer?

I bet you have a few teams that have very smart, experienced leaders that work hard.  They have been with you for years and your teams or tech would fail without them.  This is great right?

I propose that your teams are not the real problem.  The problem is the leadership of the teams.  Your team or organizational leaders should change every year or two.  Teams need to be pushed toward new tech, fresh ideas and improved processes.  Teams must be energized and motivated. 

I know an organization that has the same leadership from the top executive down to the team leads for over 10 years.  They now their customer and systems very well but very little innovation or improvements have come in years.  They are falling behind and are starting to lose business, quickly.  Their customers have lost confidence in them and their, "this is how we have always done it", mind set. 

It is changing rapidly.  Do your teams have SREs, are you doing the DevOps, are they using advanced monitoring solutions, are they very agile, are they embracing containers and cloud native architectures?  If not, bring in new tech leads that can help the leaders or even better, hire new leaders to bring that experience to your organization.

You will have to pay these new leaders well but the cost will pay off quickly.  If you not familiar with Good to Great, you should stop everything you are currently reading and read the book.  You need the right people on the bus and the Level 5 leaders to take you to the next level. 

In the end, leaders are going to grow your company (NetFlix).  Experience is going to make you fade away.(Blockbuster)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Ops: The New IT for the Cloud Era

Over the past few months of interviewing and researching dozens of companies—particularly small to mid-sized SaaS businesses—one pattern keeps emerging: the desire to stand up a Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops) organization. It makes sense on the surface. Cloud is now the infrastructure of choice, so naturally, someone needs to “own” it. But what’s unfolding in practice often misses the mark. Many companies are attempting to solve growing cloud complexity by taking all their DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering talent and consolidating them into a Cloud Ops team. The idea? Share them across product teams so no one gets overwhelmed. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same centralization tactic used by traditional IT for decades. And it's creating the same problems. When Cloud Ops Becomes Old IT in Disguise Here’s the playbook we’re seeing: Move DevOps, SRE, and Ops into a central Cloud Ops team. Let them handle infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud securit...
Post a Comment
Read more

2020 State of DevSecOps by Accurics

 This is an excellent report for all IT Pros and Engineers.   Highlights: Storage is most impacted solution Open security groups or network configuration Secrets are not so secret Unused resources are not secure. Take a look at these.  Look again.  These are not highly skilled problems.  They just need guidelines and proactive management.  The article uses policy as code as a solution for many of the problems.  I will drill into each of these more in the future.  I wanted to get the awareness out first and then, come back to solutions.  
Post a Comment
Read more

How AI is Transforming DevSecOps: A New Era of Secure, Agile Software Delivery

 As software delivery accelerates and attack surfaces grow, traditional DevSecOps practices are being pushed to their limits. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into DevSecOps workflows is not just a trend—it’s a strategic imperative. AI is driving a seismic shift in how we manage code quality, automate security, respond to threats, and enable secure innovation at scale. In this post, we’ll explore the key ways AI is improving DevSecOps and why forward-thinking organizations are embedding it deeply into their pipelines. 1. Proactive Threat Detection and Response In modern CI/CD pipelines, code moves fast—sometimes too fast for human eyes to catch every vulnerability or misconfiguration. AI helps shift security left and right by: Analyzing code and dependencies with natural language processing and ML to detect hidden vulnerabilities, insecure APIs, or anomalous changes during commits. Real-time anomaly detection in production environments using AI-powered o...
Post a Comment
Read more