This month we dive into the tricky topic of dealing with jerks.

Eric Williamson teaches us some tricks for dealing with difficult people. More importantly, of course, he sheds some light on how to not be difficult people ourselves.

I hope you enjoy listening in on this conversation as much as Eric and I did having it.

Just for some background, Eric is a professional development consultant, business coach and keynote speaker. He is the author of the book, How to Work with Jerks: Getting Stuff Done with People you Can’t Stand, and co-author of the best-selling book, When Work Works: Cutting Edge Solutions for the Contemporary Workplace. He has over two decades of professional development experience, speaking, and most importantly, real-life, hands on in-the trenches business experience in both the private and public sectors. He works with organizations to build more collaborative and harmonious workplace environments by building stronger customer and workplace relationships.

(Brené Brown book mentioned in the podcast: Dare To Lead)

While you might have seen this month’s topic - “Maximizing Innovation” - on corporate motivational posters, we assure you that we go deep in this month’s podcast to uncover exactly how we can win in this arena.

The phrase we like, “Building more cool, useful stuff” maybe says it more aptly. Whatever words you use though - a central part of software development is simply to figure out how we create the most value, the most usefulness for our customer.

So please join us as and listen along we dig into this important topic!

Improving in the art of software development can be intimidating. With this month’s episode we dive quickly into the basic algorithm that we’ve used repeatedly to realize powerful improvement on software teams!

Is this a feature? Or is it an implementation detail?

It’s easy to get the answer to this question wrong - and the wrong answer here can have profoundly negative consequences. We’ll look at three regularly mis-interpreted aspects of software development and talk about how to correctly think about them - ultimately, learning to leverage them better in order to enhance our ability to deliver software.

Whether it’s data, information security, or devops - join us as we dig into how to model these correctly and to put them to use well in our systems.

Join us this month as we dive further into team make-up - asking the difficult question, what is a senior engineer? And more practically - how do we create and/or discover them?

We have Bob Provencher - CTO at PDHI - with us again to help tackle these tricky but tactically terrific questions.

Last month he coined and defined a great term - SINO - senior in name only. This month he will help us learn to discern between top-shelf talent and the seat-warming knock-off (the SINO). He will also provide us with some in-the-trenches advice to promote growth in those with potential and to discover premium talent as we look to hire.

So sit back and enjoy - and be ready to be taken to the next level in your leadership journey.

How do we balance our engineering teams? What are the challenges involved in getting that balance right?

Join me as I dig into these questions with Bob Provencher - PDHI’s Chief Technology Officer. He offers powerful insights mined from his many years of success in this arena.

You will come away better-armed to optimally shape your teams and your organization!

In software architecture it's important to remember - sharing is not caring!

There’s a revolution underway - software organizations the world over have begun to realize that dependency-free teams are the way to deliver with speed and to innovate powerfully and regularly.

The transition is difficult though - businesses bring with them powerful inertia, making the shift from old-style organization-wide architecture to modern, streamlined design difficult at times.

Join me with my special guest, Anton Cagle as we explore several aspects of this revolution.

Leading software development is a unique challenge.

We meld the very human activity of convincing others to work with us, but we do it on two separate platforms - as we create actual software, and as we create the people and technology system (of which we are a part) that creates the software.

Both areas are vitally important - but wildly different in terms of the approach we might take to leading.

Join us as we dive into this important topic.