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.
Personality Tests
Myers Briggs: ENFP-A – Campaigner
More Details
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
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
- Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
- The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
- A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
- The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
- This Is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters
- Principles: Life and Work
- Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success
- Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
- Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
- Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
- Becoming a Technical Leader
- An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
- Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps
- The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
- The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
- Leading Quality: How Great Leaders Deliver High-Quality Software and Accelerate Growth
Newsletters I Subscribe To
- Cultivated Management - Power up Your Management Game
- Ministry of Testing - Elevate Your Testing Game
- Diversify Tech - Diversity and Inclusion in Technology
- Pie-mail - Fun and Informative in Testing
- Last Week in AWS - Stay on Top of AWS Updates
- Agile Testing Fellowship - Monthly Newsletter From Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Leaders in Testing
- Javascript Weekly - Keeping Up To Date With Latest Javascript Updates
Articles I Always Recommend
- How to answer questions in a helpful way
- How to ask good questions
- How to Provide Great Feedback When You’re Not In Charge
- How To Be A Great Leader: Timeless Leadership Traits From Roman Emperors, Philosophers, and More
- How to Dramatically Increase Your Influence as a Leader
- Why the Most Productive People Don’t Always Make the Best Managers
- The Remote Leader’s Guide to Managing a Team
- Google Spent a Decade Researching What Makes a Great Boss. It Came Up With These 10 Things
- Seven Symptoms of Bad Meetings and What You Can Do About Them
- A Software Engineering Culture Test
- The Sacrifices Of The Servant Leader
- To serve or not to serve there is no question for a leader
- 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
- Tip’s for Executive Onboarding
- Leading Organizational Change 50 + Insights for Leaders
- Manager Readme
- One-way and Two-way Door Decisions
- Career Ending Mistake | How to Plan the End of Your Career
- Is This Your Best Work?
- DRI: How Gitlab Makes Decisions
- Leaders Set the Pace
- Will Sansbury Things He Believes
- The Art of the Request
Technology Articles I Always Recommend
- How Complex Systems Fail
- Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders
- An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
- Team Topology Overview
- “Get Off the Floor” and Other Career Advice from Microsoft, Looker, Reddit & Twitter
- Your First 30 Days as a Software Developer at a Tech Company - Good to give ideas on what expectations to set for your team.
- Always do Extra
- 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer
- How to be a nice programmer
- How to Support Early Career Developers
- 11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work
- Getting a job as an engineering executive.
- Cheap Thoughts
Strengths I have to leverage in achieving my vision
- Caring
- Encouraging
- Empowering
- Trusting
- Truthful
- Aspire to be humble
- Always Learning