What does team leadership look like?

Warning – This post may create some undesired discomfort, as it is intended to reframe understanding around leadership.

In product development, leadership is behaviors that anyone can act on at an appropriate time.

For example, I arrive early to work most days.

⚡ One of my first actions is to start brewing coffee.
⚡ Another action is to load up the dishwasher to wash the dishes.
⚡ A third action is to turn off the lights over the work area to help my colleagues focus once they arrive in the office.

None of these actions require me asking for permission to do what is right by my colleagues.

As well, taking action on tasks that require little to no coordination helps us all be positioned to focus on producing desired outcomes.

Leadership is behavior that should be almost instinctive to anyone, taking the lead when the opportunity is open to do so.

Don’t wait to become a leader. No one needs to ask for permission to do what is right to assist people around them do better work.

Do you enjoy Townhall meetings at work?

I do, but why, you might wonder.

Transparency.

Trust is built through transparency. Conversations around office performance across several measures help inform how choices are made.

It also creates an investment culture. Team members identify where they can contribute directly to business performance.

As leaders show areas that are doing well and where improvement opportunities reside, people are given a choice for where they can invest their energy and time.

When team members are invested in their companies, they tend to be more active and engaged. They build connections between their colleagues and the business.

As well, they feel empowered to perform the work they are paid for AND create value supporting the business across disciplines.

In essence, it is an outcome of Conscious Capitalism. This leads to product development and solution development that benefits the communities the business serves.

If you’re interested in learning more about our culture, check out our LinkedIn profile: Improving.

We continued to work on our AI hackathon project after hours yesterday.

Moving from one step to the next is challenging, even with highly skilled developers and “as built” technology.

We invested 6 hours on Saturday learning. We invested 2 to 3 hours more yesterday.

Some of our challenges have not been quickly fixed, they have taken time to diagnose and resolve.

The enjoyable part is this is an iterative, product development effort with a team of aligned colleagues.

As well, we are testing hypotheses through our development process.

It will never be fully “done”.

There will always be opportunities to improve it.

Getting the foundational parts set up is important for us. Once they are in place, then we can build more innovative functionality onto it.

This is what life at Improving is partly about. The other part is serving our clients and customers to the best of our ability.

What enjoyable, work-related activities have you done this week?

What happens when you ask Dallas office Improving folks to enjoy free food?

A dozen show up around 8:00 AM CST on Saturday morning to eat and learn!

Kevin Jourdain facilitated an “AI hackathon” for several hours this past weekend.

It brought together my colleagues across different practice areas, including QA and UX.

We worked as two teams to achieve a set of outcomes and test the set-up of a commercially available LLM (large language model), vector database, and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) service.

As well, we verified certain programming aspects of how we decided to “chunk” our sample data. The output was deemed “good enough” by our team to move through most of the component/service setup.

We have more work to do, which we intend to complete quite soon.

It was also an opportunity to use some lightweight product development practices and lean thinking.

Here’s to my colleagues in Dallas! Great progress gents!

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