The One Simple Change to be a Better Leader – Sea:1Ep:6

Listen now!

Becoming a Geek Leader

The One Simple Change to be a Better Leader - Sea:1Ep:6

Play Episode Pause Episode

Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds

00:00 / 36:56

RSS Feed

Share

Link

In this episode:

Leadership responsibility can be confusing and frustrating the first time someone asks you  to do it. What do you need to do as you move from being an individual contributor to a leader?

Also included are steps to using ticketing systems and a couple of bloopers from Tom’s brand new speaking videos!

• Change your mindset to lead well!
• Start using ticketing systems or use your existing ticketing systems more effectively!
• Go behind-the-scenes with some deleted video content.

Resources:

• How to set up your Ticketing System to support your software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

• How to report bugs effectively

Links to Ticketing Software:

• Zen desk
• Zoho support

• VersionOne
• Clear quest – (part of IBM’s Rational software suite)
• Gemini (from countersoft) – Windows

• Mantis – for unix/linux

Transcript:

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Man 1: [00:00:00] Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 1, Episode 6.

Tom: [00:00:04] This episode of Becoming a Geek Leader is sponsored by the Geek to Great 101 course. We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more. Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, that’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

[00:01:04] Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Greek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:26 ] Welcome to episode 6. I’m glad you’re here. So, today’s episode, I want to talk about a few different things, and I just want to give you a quick heads up. First, in the mentoring segment, I’m going to be talking about how to create a new mindset to help you succeed. Next I want to talk about something that has come up recently with several of my clients, and it’s all about using a ticketing system. And if you’re not using one, how you can start right away.

[00:01:50] If you are using one, what are some things you can do that will be better, that’s going to make your use of that system richer? And is the third section today is a behind the scenes segment. I just launched a new version of my speaking page, promoting my speaking services, and I have some things to share with you including some bloopers as well. So, I’m looking forward to this episode and I’m glad you’ve joined me. Thanks.

Mentoring segment.

Tom: [00:02:35] So for today’s mentoring segment, I want to talk about mindset and a way of thinking that may be affecting your success with your work. I know a lot of us are totally overwhelmed. Sometimes we feel like, “Man, there’s just no way I could do one more thing.” And I think that’s probably true. If you feel like, “I can’t do everything on the to-do list and I’m swamped,” then I think you need to start thinking differently about what it means to do great work. And here’s what I mean by that. So you have a story in your head that talks about what does it mean for you to do great work. And if you’re like most of us, the story that’s in your head, the story you tell yourself today is the secret to your success has been because you can deliver great work as an individual contributor.

[00:03:23] It’s your understanding of the technical issues, your understanding of the requirements, your ability to overcome challenges, your ability to make connections between systems and components, how you can define problems, how your brain is in you at work to diagnose the root cause. For you to consider the different options available, troubleshoot problems, and then finally deliver a great work product. Now I’ll tell you, all of that is true. It is your brain. It is your capability that makes a huge difference in your productivity and in the value that you deliver. But here’s the thing, as you move up in your career, as you have more responsibilities in the work that you do, you have to start to think differently. Rather than seeing yourself merely as an individual contributor who has other stuff they have to do, you’ve got to start to think about how to intentionally lead your team members and delegate work to them.

[00:04:23] And I’ll give you an example. I’ve got a client who has for all of her career been very successful because she’s smart, and she’s hardworking, and she does a great job. And then she was put in a role where she’s supposed to oversee people. And now she’s trying to manage all the work stuff that she was doing before and then kind of bolting on the people stuff on top of that, bolting on managing these other projects, bolting on. And how long does it take before she is totally burned out? I , not that all really. And just because the story that she had is probably similar to the story that you have, that, “My real job is to do hands-on geek work, and this other stuff is kind of an add-on thing.” That’s the mental shift I want to challenge you to make.

[00:05:13] There’s a story you may have heard about, a man who approaches some guys who were laying bricks, some bricklayers. And he’s fascinated. He watches them for a while, and he walks up to one of them and he says, “Say, can you tell me what you’re doing?” And the first guy has been working hard, and he’s pretty annoyed. And he looks over at the guy and he snaps, he says, “I’m laying bricks. What does it look like I’m doing?” Now, our hero here decides he’s going to talk to another guy. And he walks up to him and he says, “What are you doing?” The second man looks at him and says, “I am building a cathedral.” Now see, in this example, you have been a great bricklayer. The walls you build, they’re tall, they’re strong, they’re straight. But now the time has come for you to see yourself differently.

[00:06:02] Everything you’ve done up to this point, it’s still relevant, it still matters. Your personal contribution as an individual contributor has been that story of your success. And now, your story’s got to develop a little further. Everything you’ve done still applies, but you have to apply them a little bit differently. Rather than seeing yourself as a bricklayer, you need to see yourself differently. And Marshall Goldsmith says, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” And this story, you’re thinking about what made you successful, if you’re going to get to the next level, you’re going to have to change your thinking. You’re no longer that individual contributor, just the bricklayer. The first step in being successful is thinking differently, and you’ve got to change your mindset.

[00:06:53] So you don’t measure yourself anymore by the number of bricks that you laid, or the quality of the work, the strength, and height, and straightness of the wall, or how timely you were able to put the bricks down. Now, you have to see yourself differently. Now you have to think about being the general contractor who’s building the cathedral. Of course you know how to lay bricks. Of course you do. And you’re still in the business of getting walls built, but they are the means to the end, they’re the not the end themselves. The Grand Cathedral is the end. And it’s made up of the walls and the other pieces that are created and assembled by various craftsmen all over the organization. Your job is to orchestrate the work of others.

[00:07:37] You see, it’s not enough if you merely deliver a great wall. You need to make sure that all those pieces come together to build something really amazing. Now like my client, you might look at this at this point and say, “You’re out of your mind. I’ve already got more than a full-time job just trying to keep up with the work that I’ve got. There is no way I can take on any more work.” And you’re right. What you have to do is you have to start to prioritize your work more effectively, and you’ve got to delete some of it from your to-do list, and you’ve got to delegate a good amount of the things that are on your to-do list. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to have the time it takes to be super successful.

[00:08:22] And I will tell you, I hear this all the time when clients come to me to engage me to help one of their team members. They’ll say, “Man, he is really sharp. He does a great job on the technical stuff, but he gets into the weeds and I just can’t get him out.” That’s because he’s thinking like he’s a brick layer, and his job is to build great walls. Now, I want to be clear. I’m not suggesting that what you ought to do is stop trying to build great walls. That would be ridiculous. Everybody needs us to do great work. And it’s our job to find a way to do that. But I promise you, I promise you, if you spend your time focusing on building those walls yourself, mixing up your own mortar, carrying over your own bricks, it’s going to hurt you.

[00:09:11] Because you don’t want to be in a position where you’re the one who has to try and do all those things, and at the same time, manage other people. I remember one of the first times I encountered this. I was at a project management leadership training course, and they did a simulation. And the simulation was that there were a number of different milestones that had to be delivered for the project, and they were managed by different teams. So we sort of self-organized, and then they nominated me to be the project manager to oversee the teams. The problem was, the way the simulation was designed, all of the first phase of the project had a very short timeline, and it was all due almost immediately.

[00:09:52] And I found myself trying to problem solve. I was in the midst of it trying to figure out each of the subsets, each of the walls of the cathedral. I was trying to figure out how to design and set up myself. And I became completely overwhelmed, and I was totally ineffective. And I’ll tell you, the point was made very clearly to me that day, that my job was to appoint somebody to be responsible for each of those subsections, and then hold those people accountable. But remember, I still thought of myself as a bricklayer. And I want to encourage you, I want to challenge you to begin to question your own thinking when it comes to this. So when you think about this stuff that’s on your to-do list, the things that are rattling around in your brain, even as this podcast is playing, that are distracting you, is there anything, anything at all on your list that maybe just maybe if you had the right person on the team you should delegate? Well, don’t give too much thought to that right now, but I will touch on it later on in the podcast.

[00:10:53] Just to recap, we’re changing our thinking. Up to now we’ve been successful because we’ve been an individual contributor who’s done great work and been recognized for that and rewarded for that. Our pathway to success still includes delivering great work, but now it’s looking for opportunities to intentionally delegate that work to other people because our role is no longer the individual contributor solely. Our roal is primarily the general contractor, and of course, we have the skills to step in and do that plumbing, or that carpentry, or that mason work, whatever it is we need to do. Those are things we have the capacity to do, but that’s not our primary job. Our primary job is to define the overall plan and to coordinate the activities.

[00:11:43] We’re orchestrating the delivery of other individual contributors, and that’s true even if we don’t have the formal positional power to make people do it. But our business value that we deliver to the company comes from the ability to get other people to do some of the work. And that’s today’s mentoring segment.

Tech segment.

Tom: [00:12:20] For today’s tech segment, I really have been hearing some things from my clients recently. And I wanted to touch on it because I think it’s very relevant. Because the clients that I’m working with our frequently in fairly big firms, well-established firms, firms that have adequate budgets to buy the tools that they need, and for some reason, one of the tools that is critically important to success, for some reason that’s just not being used. And so I just want to spend a few minutes today talking about ticketing systems. So in the tech world, we are in the service request business. People are asking for our help and we respond. Back in the dark ages, back when the dinosaurs of technology roamed the earth and I was early in my career, I was a help desk guy for a 30-person company. Everybody who needed any help with their technology would reach out to me.

[00:13:13] And it came in the form of a phone call or an email which was relatively new. We had internal email but not necessarily external emails then. But I would get phone calls, I would get emails, I would get hallway conversations, that says, “Oh, Tom, there you are. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about my…” And it was almost a nonstop stream of requests for help. I knew it had gone too far when I was standing in the men’s room using the facilities, and a coworker asked for computer help. I said, “Wait, I’m sorry. I’m happy to help you later, but I’m not taking tech support requests right here, right now.” So what did I do? Well, I would handle those requests as they’d come in. And what would happen? Well, the squeakiest wheel would get the grease.

[00:14:00] So whoever had the current urgent problem would get my attention. Now, a lot of times, I would remember what people asked me for. But if I’m honest, I’m going to have to confess that all too often I would forget what you asked me to do, or I would forget that I talked to you, or if I saw you in the hall, “Oh, rats. I was supposed to do something for them.” And so I would just totally forget, or I would forget what problem, “Now, they were having trouble with something. What were they having trouble with?” Or I would remember that it was a printing problem but I wouldn’t remember exactly what it was. “They were having some kind of problem with printing from Excel. I don’t know.” I’d have to go back and start all over again.

[00:14:38] And a lot of stuff ended up falling on the floor. There had to be a better way because the lack of tracking, the lack of interaction was keeping me from being able to deliver great solutions. And in fact, it was actually slowing me down pretty dramatically because I would have to start over again. Every time I would forget, I’d have to start over again. Now, unfortunately for me, it was many years later that I discovered the concept of a ticketing system. And it was even years after that that I discovered how valuable they are if you use them properly. Now, I just want to say, if you’re providing any kind of customized service to people and you’re using anything other than a ticketing system to track your work requests, I mean if you’re using a spreadsheet, or if you’re using email inbox, or if you’re using any other system, I want you to stop what you’re doing right now and get started using a tracking system. And I mean today.

[00:15:40] On the webpage for this episode, I’ve got a number of links to different systems that you might choose for that. Now, they’re not affiliate links, although that would be a good idea. I probably should get affiliate programs set up with some of these people. The thing is, it’s critically important for you to get to success. Now, I want to point out that I have used a lot of different systems in different jobs that I’ve had. Everything from so-called enterprise tools, like IBM’s ClearQuest and Rational Suite, VersionOne, open source tools like Bugzilla, and eventually built a great process on an inexpensive tool based on Windows, called Gemini from Countersoft. And I’m going to put links to those items as well as other tools that I’m aware of in the resource list, there on the podcast page.

[00:16:31] The point is this is a very valuable system. I’ve got a client who’s a technology firm, multibillion-dollar revenue technology firm, and they’re using email and phone calls to receive and manage requests from customers. Now, it’s a terrible idea. Now, I understand how it happens. We don’t think through that, “Oh, we need to be in the service request business, and we need to have a good service request management system set up.” It’s common. And so what we do? We use a tool that we already have, “Just send me an email. I’m going to forget that we talked about this. Just send me an email.” But what happens? Well, requests get lost. Requests get forgotten. They’re in so-and-so’s mailbox and they ought to be in somebody else’s mailbox. Joe was handling it, and then Joe went on vacation, now Sally’s supposed to handle it, but she doesn’t have access to Joe’s email. So she doesn’t have the information that she needs.

[00:17:29] There’s no centralized place to look for current status on a thing or who made the latest update. These requests get processed when somebody makes noise about them or when there’s some other event that comes up, “Oh, rats. We were supposed to take care of such and such.” And it’s really focused on crisis in response to crisis, not thinking about when is the best time from a business perspective to be able to deal with that. And fundamentally this process, not using a ticketing system, it’s inefficient, it’s inconsistent, and it is frustrating. So, the first thing I want to suggest is if you’re not using a ticketing system today, you should get started using one right away. Now, let’s say you are using a ticketing system. There are probably ways to improve that process.

[00:18:21] And I’ll spend a couple of minutes in this podcast talking about some things you can do to improve your ticketing process and your ticket management. But going back to, let’s say you’re not using a ticketing system. You should be able to get one set up pretty quickly. I mean if you’re on Windows or OSX or UNIX, there are options for every single platform, including lots of software as a service options. So there are lots and lots of tools available. And frequently, people will ask questions like, “What’s the best tool that I should use?” The best tool you should use is one you will actually use, and the best process to implement is something that is really simple to implement. And here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say right now that you’re using a process that goes something like this, “Hey, Tom, I need some help with…” “Okay, can you send me an email?” or, “I’ll make a note.” Something along those lines.

[00:19:16] What you want to start doing is pick a tool, any tool because any tool is better than no tool and get started. And what you want to do is say to people, “Hey, would love to help you. I need you to open a ticket.” You want to write that down. “I’d love to help you, but I need you to open a ticket.” Because what you need to do is get people used to the idea that they need to open a ticket when they want help. So, you simply lay it out there and you say, “Oh, fantastic. You’re having trouble with that? I’d love to help you. Can I ask you to open a ticket for me?” Once the ticket is open, the first thing you want to do is do not get bogged down in defining all the different things that might come from that. What you want to do is when you’re going from no process to implementation of a ticketing process, get everybody using the ticketing system before you do anything else. Before you do anything else.

[00:20:10] So your two ticket states are the ticket is open, the ticket is closed. That’s all you need to implement. Now, when I was working in software, one of the things I did was implement a process, and we refined the process to include all kinds of things because when a request comes in, particularly if you’re talking about software, but when a request comes in and somebody says, “I need help.” The options are either the product was designed to do that or it wasn’t. And if the product was not designed to do that, that’s either, “Hey, our product doesn’t do that.” For example, you might be building a timesheet tool or something, right? And let’s say that you’ve got your timesheet system in place and somebody opens an incident. They said, “Hey, the timesheet system’s broken. It doesn’t make coffee for me.” Well, yes, it doesn’t make coffee, but that’s something that you should have known. It was a timesheet program. It’s not a coffee program, so no coffee for you.

[00:21:11] You might need to account for, “Hey, sorry. It doesn’t do that,” in terms of your ticket state, but don’t start with that. What you want to start with is open or closed. And your response to that is, “Our timesheet tool doesn’t make coffee. Sorry.” And close the ticket. It’s as simple as that. Now, after you’ve had the opportunity, after you have retrained everybody to the idea that the first thing they need to do is open a ticket, then you’ve got the opportunity to improve the process. Now, I mentioned that I was working on this in a small company and as we built out our SDLC. And we actually used it from a helpdesk perspective. People would ask, “Hey, I need help with this part of the product.” And we would have a review system where somebody would go in and say, “Is the product designed to do that from the beginning or is it not designed to do that?”

[00:22:00] And if the product is designed to do that, maybe it’s a user training error and we actually had different ticket states, and we would assign it to different work queues based on the state of the ticket. Eventually we had 13 different states that we walked our tickets through to be able to determine whether it was a bug or a feature request, whether it was a user training problem, or a “Sorry, we don’t do that.” All those different types of things. And the goal is to have a robust system that supports your business process. If you have weak or inconsistently defined business process today, it’s going to be very painful for you to try and go from no process or weak process to a really robust process. So my recommendation because nobody goes from couch potato to running a marathon overnight, what you do is you start with something simple. And the simple thing you start with is let’s get everybody using the ticketing system, and then let’s make improvements from there.

[00:22:59] For those of you who already have some process running, and you’ve already got some mechanism for prioritizing and organizing information, you’re using a tool, some kind of ticket tracking system for your requests, I want to encourage you to think through how to make that process better. For example, one of the things that happened regularly was people would open up a request and they would put insufficient information in. They would say, “XYZ doesn’t work.” But they wouldn’t tell us exactly what we needed to know in order to be successful. So, one of the things that I will include in the show notes is a link to an article called, “How to Report Bugs Effectively.” And it includes the things that it takes to do a great job of reporting bugs. Now, I don’t send this to you to suggest that what you ought to do is send this link to people and say, “Hey, dummy, use this when you report a bug.”

[00:23:57] But what it will do is help you think through how can you make it easy for your customers when they’re reporting things. For example, what we did was we developed a template that had a series of questions that were common questions about, “Does it only happen to you? Does it happen every time?” Those types of things, so that we can reproduce the problem. So we could figure out how to get it to engineering and get the problem fixed. I just opened a ticket with a vendor, I’m using a SaaS tool, and there was a problem. And I opened a ticket, and I sent in the details, and the data, and the reproducible use case. And they kicked it back to me and said, “Oh, that’s user error.” “Man, you’re making me crazy. No, no, it wasn’t user error.” And I went back and said, “Check the ticket. Here’s what I said.”

[00:24:46] The thing is, most people get terrible bug reports all the time. And so I’m sure that the default response tends to be, “Hey, go back and try it again, user.” What I want you to think through though, is how do you make it easy for your customer, easy for your user to be able to report, “Hey, I’m having this problem,” and give you the information in a way that you can be successful? We had to come up with some categorization. So for example, we defined, every ticket when it came in had to be categorized, is it a bug? Is it an enhancement? Or is it a task? Some kind of research project, or I need help with something. When it came to severity for bugs, we had to define what does it mean for it to be a critical bug, or a normal bug, or a minor bug? And we actually defined, for example, a normal bug was a bug that affected just one piece of functionality. We could even release with a normal bug.

[00:25:39] So, an example might be the date filter works on some page selections but doesn’t work on others. We might decide as the product management team we’re going to let that go. The point is, what you want to do is help people have clear definitions because if you don’t, then every issue is critical when I as the customer decide it’s critical. We also talked about whether things should be set up as the priority. So the requester could say how severe is it, but then we, when we were managing it internally, we would set, as the product management team, we would set the issue priority. We would decide how urgently we were going to go after that. We also had tags in our system for what version we were going to use. We had places that people could attach additional information, and then the status. We had 13 different statuses for new, to review, to assigned, all kinds of things, all the way through the list.

[00:26:32] And I don’t have time to go through every single one of those in today’s episode. And then we had resolutions defined for each one of those things. I’m not suggesting that you should do what we did. Entirely, you shouldn’t mimic that. You should build out your business process that works as smoothly and as easily as you can with the people who are using your system. So, if you’re not using a ticket tracking system today, I want you to stop listening to this podcast, go to my website, take a look at those tools, pick from one of those or pick something else. But you should be using some sort of incident management system because it makes it so much easier for you. You will get more work done. Your customers will be happier. You’ll be able to get some analysis of the work that you’re doing if you’re using a system that tracks what’s happening.

[00:27:21] And if you’re already using the system, I want you to think through what could you do to take one baby step to make that a little bit better. I’m telling you, using a ticket tracking system for incident management is critically important. Now, the examples I gave today come from software because that’s the world I grew up in. But this is equally applicable to replacing light bulbs and other maintenance items in your building or any other incident response type thing, reprovisioning somebody with access to a system, or resetting a password. All those types of things. Anything that is a request and a response, having some sort of unique identifier tied to a specific request in a centralized repository where you can get access to that information. I would’ve thought that in 2016, we would have that down, that everybody would be using it.

[00:28:10] But I’m hearing enough for my clients that there are places and times in lots of different organizations where those types of things are not happening. And I even have one client that uses paper for heaven sakes, to track what’s going on. And one other thing that I want to point out here is to realize that this is a journey not a destination. To go from not using a system to using a system is the first step, and try and make it as simple as possible, just open and closed. And then realize that it’s going to take a while to get there. Even if you’ve begun to use a ticketing system, even if you’ve begun to do to get open and ticket closed, it’s going to be a while before you get everybody consistently doing that.

[00:28:54] And you have to realize technology is not the limiter here, it’s behavioral change. And I will tell you as difficult as technology is, people are harder. So, with that in mind, what I want you to think about is if you’re already using a ticketing system, and I mentioned this before, but I want to reinforce it, think of one thing you could do to make it a little bit better. And then try to think about making changes to that on a scheduled basis. So we’re only going to make changes to our business process maybe four times a year. So this quarter we’re going to try and get open, closed. Next quarter, we’re going to start to talk about how we’re going to prioritize those tickets and collect some of that additional information when we get the tickets submitted themselves.

[00:29:38] Don’t try and take it all on at once. It’s way too much to take on at once. But take on something and start making some small changes. Using an incident management or ticket tracking system is critically important for you to be able to plan and manage the work that’s coming into your queue. And I just want to encourage you to take action right away on that, and that is today’s tech segment.

Behind the scenes segment.

Tom: [00:30:16] I’m a geek, a highly technical expert. Well, at least I used to be. Welcome to the behind the scenes segment. So that clip you just heard was a piece from the video shoot that we’ve recently did as part of the total revamping of my public speaking page. And one of the things I’ve been learning in this business is just how much goes into production of media. Now, I’ve mentioned before on the podcast that learning how to produce great quality audio was one of the things that I had to come up to speed on. One of the other things I’m learning about is great video production. Years ago I worked in a photo lab, and I learned that the way that you expose the negative is important, and also the way you print the photo matters. And now, certainly with Photoshop, we’ve learned a lot about how to adjust the way things go, hence the tag #nofilter, right?

[00:31:08] So in this process, to produce the speaker’s video, we had to do quite a bit of work to go back over a number of other sources of data, other places I had spoken, other video that had been shot. We had to try and find a way to craft the story and do a storyboard. It was really pretty interesting. And what you don’t see a lot is really the behind the scenes stuff. So everything from the director yelling, “Take!” to the interruptions that happen on the set. Now in this case, the set was the back porch of my house. And as you know, my kids live here. So, we had a couple interruptions. Things like this, “Sweetie pie, what are you distracting for me back there?” That happened as my daughter who was very interested in the lights, and camera, and action that was happening walked around the side of the house, and came up the stairs, and walked into the area where we were shooting. And it’s definitely distracting trying to focus on how do you do the right work, and at the same time, have people watching.

[00:32:11] Do you ever find yourself at a solemn event? Maybe it’s a graduation, or a religious observance, or something like that. And all of a sudden something strikes you as funny. Happens to all of us. And then the more serious you’re supposed to be, the harder it is to be serious. Well, we had a couple of light moments on our set as well, where one of the kids was going to let the dog out to join us. “Get the dog out here. Oh!” One of the things I’m learning is that no matter how hard you practice or how many times you go over things, it takes multiple takes to be able to get something that’s really production ready.

[00:32:52] And once you’ve done that, there’s still a tremendous amount of editing. I have to say now that I’m in a bit of the media production business, I can’t stop looking at, “How did they light that?” when I’m watching television. Or, “How did they capture that? Where’s the microphone for that?” Or, “Look at those sound effects they did.” It’s amazing how much complexity goes into the things that we see, and we’re just accustomed to production quality stuff. If you want to see the final result of the work we did, please check out the videos which you can find on my website brighthillgroup.com/speaking, that’s brighthillgroup.com/speaking. Hope you check it out. And that’s today’s behind the scenes segment.

Episode hack.

Tom: [00:33:56] Just to review, today we talked about having a new mindset. You’re no longer the bricklayer, you’re the general contractor who oversees the bricklayers. You may lay some bricks yourself, but you are the general contractor. We also talked about using a ticketing system to help you keep track of the work that you’re doing. And finally, I shared a little bit about the creation and launch of my new speaking page. So here’s today’s episode hack. I want you to take 30 seconds right now to think about one thing that’s on your to-do list where you’re the bricklayer but you probably ought to be delegating that out and acting like the general contractor. So just think about one thing that you are doing now that you might need to let go and let somebody else do. Now, I’m going to give you 30 seconds to think about that right now. I’ll be back in half a minute.

[00:35:28] So what did you come up with? What’s the one thing where you’re acting like a bricklayer but you really ought to let it go? If you could take just one thing, move that forward, it’s going to help you a whole lot. And that’s today’s episode hack.

Closeout

[00:35:44] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give me a good rating in iTunes, this podcast will show up in their “New and Noteworthy” section. Being in “New and Noteworthy” is a great way to attract more listeners, and having more listeners helps me have the support to keep the podcast going.

[00:36:08] There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes store in the Podcast section. Two, search for “Becoming a Geek Leader,” and three, give the podcast a great rating. And while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks!

[00:36:28] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.