The leadership pathways
In any job, your role is to deliver value. Society has always largely worked on this principle - you deliver value to your community, and the community takes care of your needs. It gives you safety, sustenance, belonging, purpose and more.
Value that you bring to the community used to just mean the output of your labour, i.e. the food, shelter or security you produce. Then it was changed to mean value for shareholders, but hopefully in today’s society it means more than that too.
Humans tend to think of things in frameworks or structures, which is why I’ve simplified the types of value you can bring to an organisation that this course covers into pathways that contain levels.
People Leadership - developing people and culture
Directional Leadership - getting those people all focused in the right direction
Operational Leadership - enabling those people to do their best work
Financial Leadership - doing the above at the lowest cost or best use of capital
Technical Leadership - managing technology to deliver value
You’re likely using my courses to learn how to be a better leader in some shape or form. At the end of the day, every problem is a people problem and your time only scales so far so scaling your impact in any direction means finding ways to do so without actually coding, or giving your own time to the problem directly. You’ll need to develop people, focus their attention and arm them with the right tools and processes even if you’re a principal engineer spanning many engineering teams without any direct reports.
It’s important to remember that from organisation to organisation, role to role and even over time in the same role, the same job title might involve different emphasis on these forms of leadership. This course gives you the knowledge and means to apply that knowledge to take you up Bloom’s taxonomy and make you be the best in the role you’re in or the role you want despite these organisational differences.
Interview questions
- N/A
Practice exercises
- Think about those you’ve worked with. Who is the best leader you know in each of these categories?
- What do they do that makes them good at that form of leadership?
Further reading
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