Being a good leader is tricky. There are a lot of things you need to do in order to successfully lead your team. There may be more things you shouldn’t do. Over the course of this post we will discuss five of those things you should not do and why they are killing your leadership and hurting your team.
You may be making one or more of these mistakes but you, and only you, can fix them. So, lets dive right in!
One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).
"All too often, however, committees don't work well at all -- resulting in a relentlessly short-term outlook, an inability to stick to strategic plans, a slapdash pursuit of the latest fad and a tendency to blame mistakes on somebody else."
-Jason Zweig, "The Intelligent Investor: How Group Decisions End Up Wrong-Footed", The Wall Street Journal, April 25-26, 2009
I seem to collect a number of books each year. A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems. Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library. The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.
Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn
"An objective without strategy, or a strategy without execution remains a dream."
- Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom, "Contributing back to Drupal", Buytaert.net.
Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States. I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults. Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.
I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site. The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World". Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.
"If you think you need filtering technologies to be sure your employees aren't damaging your reputation, that's a management problem, not a technology one. If employees can't be trusted, technology is the least of your problems."
- Tim Bray, Director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc., "Keeping Secrets in a WikiBlogTubeSpace World", ComputerWorld, March 19, 2007
