Hack:
Power to the Geeks: Can “techies” be developed to lead and manage their own?

By nature “techies” love technology and more recently sharing technology for free, i.e. open source. So why not create an open source leadership development system, build it on a web based platform and use some concepts from social networking type sites. Within this system create the tools to work through a proposed five phase development framework as outlined below. The Framework 1. Strategy Alignment – The organisation agrees development of non-technical leadership and people skills within its “techie” ranks is important. 2. Identification – who wants to be a leader now or in the future? This is not necessarily about saying who has potential but instead asks who wants to give it a try. Equally it allows those who are actually content to focus on their technical career to do so without the fear of being promoted into leadership positions. It may sound unbelievable but some engineers do leave the profession for fear of having to actually lead or manage against their will. Some “techies” are in it for life, could we agree this is actually ok? These people then create the “followers” group who can be trained on good following skills. 3. Initial Assessment – Those who wish to jump on the development train are run through various forms of assessment to establish, strengths, weaknesses, goals, and past experience. Getting people early in their career is essential to ensure growth from the bottom up. 4. Experience and Challenge - Exposing technical people to leadership challenges and experiences has been identified as key to their development. The tool will provide real and simulated experiences and challenges that users can respond to and have feedback on their decisions and approaches. 5. Assessment and Feedback - The final phase to close the loop. The use of data and measurement is good motivation for technical people and they will respond well to this. This last phase is used to identify areas that have improved and those still needing development based on the requirements of the current and potential future roles. Once identified this forms input into phase 4 and the cycle continues throughout the career path. This is the phase where people who struggle to make progress are identified and may be better suited to a technical career path. The Tool The tool would allow operations such as: • People to complete assessments and place feedback on other people’s decisions, leadership, behaviour. E.g. a Facebook Like / Dislike type concept. • Mentors can issue real or simulated challenges to expose people to new experiences and assess their response. This can build a database of organisational challenges for the future. • Followers can rate leader’s performance on a real time basis to provide a graph similar to political “worm” type charts. An instant pulse check for people in the upper layers on how things are tracking. • Weekly “simulated” or current real situations faced by the organisation can be issued with the ability for everyone to log a potential response or solution and these are in turn rated by everyone else.