Quick thoughts on "How to Coach CTOs" with Joel Chippindale

After some postponing due to a busy April, I've eventually made time to listen to another Refactoring podcast episode: How to Coach CTOs.

Here are my customarily short notes on the most important takeaways. I added this episode to the compilation of my favorite podcast episodes.

Focus on your strengths

This is brilliant advice, which is often overlooked, even though it surfaces in lots of places (Drucker, Munger, Rumelt, Covery).

I'd pair it with Munger's advice to, erm, minimize your errors (he calls it avoiding stupidity), which I interpret as a more active version of focusing on strengths.

Understanding the fear(s) of your peers

This is not covered in the episode, but I thought it would make a great complement to understanding their goals and their objectives. I wrote about fear last year and it's been very valuable for me to unpack executives requests and ideas.

Relationship with peers

Can't believe this advice is actually free:
Many early-career CTOs struggle with a fundamental mindset shift: seeing themselves primarily as members of the executive team rather than as representatives of the engineering team.

This is brilliant, at least to me. Stop thinking you're there to show what Engineering is doing and start aligning Engineering with the C-suite goals and targets.

The Talking Business journal from ITRevolution can help expand the above statement into something more detailed and from different angles (organizational, individual, practices, exercises, terminology, checklists). It goes as far as saying that "leading with technology actually limits effectiveness".


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