Butch Mayhew’s Leadership Playbook

Goal

To grow, inspire, and serve my team while seeking and implementing ways to push the company forward.

Vision

  • I am known for having the best teams because I set a high bar, and step aside for my team to succeed.
  • I deeply care about my team members personal lives, professional goals, and career aspirations.
  • I default to trust and always see the best in people.
  • I expect the best attitude and effort from my team.
  • I seek out ways to amplify strong performers on my team.
  • I believe sharing is caring. I share information, shortcuts, and useful tools with the entire team so we all succeed.
  • I make my bosses life easier by anticipating needs before they arise.

“WHY” be an exceptional leader?

  • Delivering high quality software to our customers requires me to empower my leaders and teams in making the best decisions to meet our bi-weekly sprint goals with few escaped defects released to production.
  • To inspire my team to deliver excellence in their craft (Testing / Test Automation)
  • To help foster continuous learning within my teams so that my team members grow their personal careers and provide additional value to the business.

Being an exceptional leader means

Putting others before myself, empowering and trusting the team to execute, inspiring others towards continuous improvement, and providing growth opportunities.

LEADER mnemonic

Personality Tests

Myers Briggs: ENFP-A – Campaigner

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Positives Negatives
Curious Poor Practical Skills
Observant Find it Difficult to Focus
Energetic and Enthusiastic Overthink Things
Excellent Communicators Get Stressed Easily
Know How to Relax Highly Emotional
Very Popular and Friendly Independent to a Fault

Enneagram: 3w2 Achiever/Helper

More Details
Positives Negatives
Dedicated to achieving goals Being over competitive or possessive
Self-confident and self-aware Unintentionally manipulative
Able to easily connect with others
Being efficient in the workplace
  • Direction of Growth: 6 (cooperative, considerate, committed)
  • Direction of Disintegration: 9 (disengaged, apathetic)

Mascot: Tardigrade (Water Bear) the most resilient animal known to science

Tardigrades Image

Learn More

Tardigrades were discovered in 1983 but placed in plastic baggies, and locked away in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer for more than 30 years. In 2014 they were thawed out and came back to life. The tardigrade, also known as water bears, are small animals found in many different environments on land and sea. They are typically about 0.1 to 1mm in length, and have 8 legs with claws. These animals have the remarkable ability to survive extremes including very low temperatures, high levels of radiation and exposure to chemicals that are harmful to other forms of life.

Don’t let their squishy appearance fool you. These microscopic invertebrates are highly resilient. In fact, they’re considered ‘extremophiles,’ with near super-power abilities of defense in harsh conditions. How do they do this? They adapt to their environment, when they are removed from water and dried out, tardigrades can transform into a cellular fortress, tucking in their legs and head, forming a compact pill shape called a ‘tun’. During this transformation they create a mummified glass suite of armor protecting them and allowing them to hibernate. Tardigrades have been exposed to the vacuum of space in tun form and some survived after being rehydrated, making them the first animals on record to survive complete space exposure.

My Leadership Beliefs

  • Blame the process not the people
  • There are no dumb questions only dumb answers
  • Don’t make the same mistake twice
  • People are smart and will figure things out
  • Stay open minded (challenging my existing assumptions)
  • Listen with intent
  • Invest in the people
  • Asking and Listening to the team is the path to understanding
  • Foster safety and empowerment within my teams
  • Take Care of the Mission and Take Care of the people
  • Lead by example
  • Praise in public, criticize in private
  • Your attitude is a choice
  • Bring solutions not problems
  • Show me the data!
  • Without hansei it is impossible to have kaizen
  • Address issues Head On - ‘It is what it is’
  • Don’t talk too much or too soon
  • Default to action
  • Feedback is a gift
  • Managers manage the known, Leaders manage the unknown
  • Embrace the grind
  • Be excellent to one another
  • Ownership is taken not given
  • Act Like an Owner
  • Always Show Up
  • Share the Credit
  • Outcomes > Output
  • Scrappy over Scale(in context of startup)

My Leadership Approach

  • Document all the things!
  • Empower the team
  • Hire smarter people than me
  • Create a safe environment to ask questions
  • Complain free zone
  • When problems arise, always work toward getting to the root of it
  • Analyze problems from different perspectives
  • Always be teaching
  • Integrity: Do the right thing
  • Quality: Raise the bar
  • Humility: Seek to learn
  • Purpose: Make a difference
  • Collaboration: Succeed as a team
  • Innovation: Build the future
  • Require Honesty & Positivity
  • Grit and Grin

Engineering Leadership

  • Resilience is a verb
  • Make intelligent mistakes - Try new things that may or may not work
  • Stay Curious
  • Keep an open mind
  • Challenge the way it’s always been done
  • Fast detection over prevention

Standard of Excellence in Technology

The Continuous Delivery of Quality Software

Quotes That Inspire Me

We can deliver as an individual contributor but we can deliver so much more as a leader.

Good leaders must first become good servants. - Robert Greenleaf

Dealing with Procrastination: Screw it, Let’s do it.

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way. - Lee Iacocca

I am the master of my failure… If I never fail how will I ever learn. – C.V. Raman

It is clear that the work of a servant-leader never ends, that the leader’s work is largely invisible to the team… but that it is always central to their mission success and their wellbeing. And that is more than enough to keep leaders going. - Lt. General Huntoon (ret.)

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. -John Quincy Adams

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. - Henry Ford

If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. - Bear Bryant

When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: 1. Admit it. 2. Learn from it, and 3. Don’t repeat it. - Bear Bryant

Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible, and collaborativeThey never invest too much in their ideas because they know they are going to have to alter them. They know there’s no right place to start so they simply start somewhere and see what happens. They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after its “solved” than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough. They’re never convinced that they know enough to solve the problem, so they are constantly testing their ideas on different stakeholders. - Jay Rosen

One does not deserve to lead unless he maintains the very skills he requires of those he commands. - General Tellus

It should be clear that no manager, no architect, no designer, no matter how lofty, can precisely estimate just how many features can be done by how many programmers in how much time. If we shoot that arrow into the air, we have no idea where it’s coming down. - Ron Jeffries

Do or do not. There is no try. - Master Yoda

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. - Michael Jordan

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. - Albert Einstein

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. - Albert Einstein

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. - Stephen Covey

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Nothing will work unless you do. - Maya Angelou

Believe you can and you’re halfway there. - Theodore Roosevelt

When I talk to a manager, I get the feeling that they are important. When I talk to a leader, I get the feeling that I am important.

The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. - Peter M. Senge

People don’t resist change. They resist being changed. - Peter M. Senge

Your strategy is only perfect until you get new information. - Barry Ehigiator

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. - Albert Einstein

The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing. - Socrates

Given the situation or issue you’re describing, what does support/addressing it look like to you? And/or what does success look like to you? - Mike U

My Leadership Library

Newsletters I Subscribe To

Articles I Always Recommend

Technology Articles I Always Recommend

Strengths I have to leverage in achieving my vision

  • Caring
  • Encouraging
  • Empowering
  • Trusting
  • Truthful
  • Aspire to be humble
  • Always Learning

Leaders I Admire

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