I got tagged by both Brent and Grant on Chris Shaw’s latest quiz.
Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?
I think the person who stands out the most is my previous manager. I’m not going to name him, and I’m not going to drone on for pages as to why I think he qualified, I’m going to give a couple of examples of things that happened.
A couple years back I realised that I was so busy keeping up with my work load that I wasn’t finding time to keep up with new developments, new ways of doing things, new releases, etc.
I went to my manager and explained to him that I was supposed, as part of my job reponsibilities, to keep up with new developments and share that information with the rest of the team, if it was applicable. However the pile of optimisation work was overwhelming. Would he mind if I put aside half an hour a day to just read books, blogs, support articles, etc, even though I had so much other work piled up that it would take a couple months to finish it all. His immediate reply, “Are you sure half an hour’s enough?”
Another time I was sitting in his office summarising the cause of a DB outage. It had been a deployment problem if I recall, it shouldn’t have happened. One of the high level business managers stormed in and demanded to know who he should shout at for this. Manager’s reply, “You shout at me.”
We all got shouted at later, but by our manager, not by the business person and it was more a case of “This should not have happened, it won’t happen again, will it?”
When I decided to leave that company, the hardest part was telling my manager that I was leaving. It turned out that he resigned two months after I left, for very much the same reasons.
Hmmm, now, who to tag?
I think Paul Randal and Christopher Stobbs
Wow, that’s awesome about the shouting. That’s my kind of manager.
Agrees, though I think it might have been less painful had the business manager been the one to yell at us.