Technical Leadership Training
Delivering customized programs to key technologists
In most IT departments and companies, several key technical staff contribute significantly more than others to the success of projects. These high-performing individuals often have the ability to raise the skills of those around them and, because of this, they multiply the productivity and performance of technical teams and raise the effectiveness of the whole organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of IT training programs focus either on helping junior staff develop technical skills or on keeping teams current with new technologies. While these programs are valuable and necessary, they overlook an opportunity that exists for organizations to achieve significant breakthroughs in their overall performance.
That opportunity is to develop strategic, high-performing technical staff as leaders who can radically increase the effectiveness of teams, improve the organization's ability to deliver successful solutions and enhance the bottom line.
What distinguishes technical leadership?
Technical leaders work with multiple paradigms and perspectives to achieve breakthrough results.
Everyone—no matter what role they fill in an organization—has a different point of view. A point of view always occurs in a paradigm. Each point of view is limited by the assumptions, concepts, values and practices—the paradigm—in which they operate. For example, object-oriented programming is a very different paradigm than functional or procedural programming, and it is a well-known fact that a successful transition between those paradigms requires programmers to learn a new way of thinking. Different paradigms allow for different points of view, which in turn allow for different actions to be taken, and thus for new results to be produced.
Technical leadership can be thought of as a holistic way of leading projects and people that involves technical excellence and leadership capacities. It allows technologists to be able to simultaneously “stand in the shoes” of the coding professional, the senior executive, and the project manager. By being able to see the world from these multiple perspectives, the technical leader can work with the paradigms of each point of view (technology, economics and management) and transcend them.
How do we develop technical leaders?
One of the key assumptions upon which our technical leadership programs are built is that people act based on their point of view. If their point of view only includes technical aspects, they will make sub-optimal decisions that can derail a project or end up creating unanticipated problems (often because of something they didn't know they didn't know at the start of the project).
Our instructors empower technologists by helping them understand these 3 key paradigms so they can clearly see where they stand in relationship to any project or task—no matter what their technical skills are.
- Technology paradigm (focus on the 'products')
- Economic paradigm (focus on the business)
- Management paradigm (focus on the people)
We distinguish between working 'in' a paradigm and working 'with' a paradigm. A professional who is working 'in' a paradigm is operating within the point of view of that paradigm and is only able to produce results based on the range of actions possible from that perspective. Leaders who are aware of the various paradigms operating in their organization can also see the limitations these paradigms place on creativity and innovation.
Technical leaders, therefore, can “think outside the box” (that is, think outside the technology paradigm) because they can look at problems from the economic or management paradigms as well.
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