Leadership doesn't come from a title and having oodles of experience won't make you a great manager, so what does?

Prerequisite
None

Outline
Session description:
Let's talk about what the differences are between management and leadership, how leading with kindness will inform your choices in both good and bad ways, and how good management and leadership keeps teams happy, productive, and engaged.

Key topics:
Leadership, management, empathy

Brief overview:
Management and leadership are often used interchangeably but they are fundamentally different things. Have you ever worked with a team member who's great at driving a conversation forward? What about someone who’s great at diffusing tense situations? Or someone who you look to for consensus building? That’s leadership.

Management is often about the more practical day to day. Who is the person reminding you to complete your compliance tasks or your training? What about the person who organizes team events or publishes the on-call rota? That’s management.

Neither of these are complete lists but leadership and management are difficult, complex, and challenging. Success is measured very differently for them than for your engineering and development work.

In this session we’ll look at how to lead with kindness, what that means in practice and how using it as a guiding principle will help you do your job better and help you move your career forward. We’ll also discuss some pitfalls to avoid and how leading with kindness doesn’t mean being a doormat or never having tough conversations. And to finish we’ll look at how to measure your leadership success and feel good about your choices.

Learning Objectives
Understanding what leadership and management are, how to to do both and how to leverage them at every stage of your career, all with kindness as your guiding principle.

Experience level
Beginner