Steve Smith

(available on LinkedIn)

I describe myself an engineering advisor. An engineering leader, a former engineer, who now likes to advise other engineering leaders. And as an advisor, I often reflect on what makes someone effective, and ineffective, in such a role. What makes a good advisor?

One way to define good advice is by understanding what bad advice looks like, and avoiding those pitfalls. And when it comes to advisors, there’s a lot of bad advice out there. Advice can be uninformed, ill-timed, non-actionable, or disrespectful, but my personal favourite is unwelcome advice.

Unwelcome advice may seem harmless, but it’s deeply damaging. It can feel patronising, intrusive, and undermine your confidence to handle your own challenges. And it’s often well-intentioned, which makes it difficult to say “I didn’t ask for help” or “I’m good thanks” without causing offence.

I’d say good advice is respectful of autonomy:

• If someone doesn’t ask me for help and I have something to offer, I try to create a space in which they know it’s OK to ask
• If someone does ask me for help, I try to offer insights that encourages self-reflection, empowers better decisions, and allows for a different course to my own

I say “try” because humility is so important. Being a good advisor isn’t easy, I’ve made mistakes, and I’m always learning from peers in the technology industry like Rachel Uhrig David Espley and Sam McGregor . And of course, my family, who hear “I didn’t ask for help” or “I’m good thanks” with patience and good humour, at least once a day.

(available on LinkedIn)

I’ve been reflecting on servant leadership a lot recently. It started in August, when I saw Lauren Woods‘s inspiring talk at ETLS Las Vegas about her leadership at Southwest Airlines.

(Gene Kim and I swap notes on IT Revolution and Agile On The Beach speaker management, and we agree an event has to open with a great keynote. Lauren did just that)

Southwest is big on servant leadership. Its founder Herb Kelleher once said “I’d rather have a company bound by love than a company bound by fear”. And as president, Colleen Barratt shaped customer strategy and employee culture in terms of corporate values and service. It’s a big part of their enduring success.

That commitment to servant leadership resonates with me at Equal Experts, where our network and business are grounded in treating everyone equally regardless of their role. My role as Global SVP Technology at Scale is to enable our customers and engagement teams to succeed. I can’t succeed on my own.

It’s hard to explain servant leadership. I used to describe it just by saying I’m opposed to saviour leadership. That’s where a well-intentioned hero tries to solve team/organisation problems themselves. Over time, they’re over-involved and burn out, while the team/organization is over-reliant and growth opportunities are missed for others. It’s short-term gain and long-term pain.

On a recent flight to the USA, I re-read The Secrets of Consulting by Jerry Weinberg. It’s a great read, and I’d forgotten that Jerry outlined a servant leadership model of MOIJ – motivation, organization, information, and jiggling. I realised that’s a close approximation of how I approach servant leadership:

• Motivation. Encouraging people, acknowledging them, giving them feedback, and having empathy for their situation
• Organization. Creating or modifying structures and resources so it’s easier for people to do their work
• Information. Sharing facts, ideas, theories, so people have more knowledge and different perspectives to act upon
• Jiggling. Offering new ideas to people, to shake them out of a rut when they’re stuck

Although as the son of a trade unionist and a pharmacist, maybe servant leadership wasn’t really a choice for me 🙂