My path on the leadership track

17 Nov 2021

At the current point in my career, it becomes more and more important to train myself on my leadership skill-set. Leadership is something that I am interested in for a long time.

The early days

It all started back in middle school when I was in a class that focused on something called CoCoCo which stands for Communication, Cooperation, Conflict Resolution. Where the goal was mainly to learn how to educate yourself in cooperation with other students and how to deal with schoolyard quarrels. It sparked my interest in the area of social communication and dealing with people’s problems.

The student years

After a good start in middle school, this path of my career was mostly set aside during my time in high school where the only focus points were my roles as team lead and project manager in various school projects.
It gained more traction again during my university studies where I focused a lot on the area of conflict resolution, coaching, team-building. I also get the opportunity to use these learned skills when I became a tutor for software engineering and afterward took over the administration of the lectures in software engineering leading a team of about twenty to twenty-five tutors.

The present

After trying out some jobs I eventually ended up in a large corporation as a small developer in a team of six to eight very skilled engineers. Everything was solved in a very democratic way. People joined and people left but we managed to stay at about the same size with a very experienced technical lead who was one of the technical founders of the product I work on.
Fast forward two years. Our lead developer left and after expressing my interest I became the chapter lead of the newly re-branded backend chapter. My next challenge was to scale up the chapter to our current size of about fifty developers.

Game of Thrones

The biggest learning in my two years as a chapter lead is the importance of knowing whom you can trust to drive your topics. Whom you need to talk to, to move mountains, and when you take a step back stand-down of your opinion and just offer some support regardless if you like the idea or not.
Or what is simply called politics.