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How NOT to lead geeks

by Matthew Stibbe on February 14, 2008

image Alexander Kjerulf is in the category of people who wrote their own job description and then people took them seriously. The self-described Chief Happiness Officer is working on the same "Happy People" project at HP as me and I really like his blog.

Like me, he comes from an IT background. I think is why I enjoyed his post: How NOT to lead geeks so much. In summary:

  1. Downplay training
  2. Give no recognition (I used to write handwritten thank you letters to team members when products shipped, but I wished I had given more recognition generally.)
  3. Plan too much overtime (I was very guilty of this back in the day)
  4. Use management-speak (see my old posts The Devil’s Marketing Dictionary Part One, Part Two and Part Three)
  5. Try to be smarter than the geeks
  6. Act inconsistently
  7. Ignore the geeks
  8. Make decisions without consulting them
  9. Don’t give them tools
  10. Forget that geeks are creative workers

Another common problem in my experience is "two peoples divided by a common language".  I wrote about Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience and (in the opposite sense) How to write like a hacker.

Just as management-speak is inspires cynicism in geeks, techno-speak inspires fear in managers. I’m thinking of writing a post on this. Does anyone have good examples? Any good suggestions for bridging the gap?

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  4. 10 more way to crack (blogger) writer’s block
  5. Simplicity itself

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Ed Lee February 14, 2008 at 12:51 pm

i think you could’ve left the word “geeks” off and it would be just as effective.
ed

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PHP Encoder February 14, 2008 at 1:22 pm

I fully agree with you and learned the hard way. As a manager I did not take into consideration the creative talent and since I did so there have been major improvements. Involving the whole team in decision making has been one of the best things I’ve done

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