Pick Up a Hammer and Start Hammering

If your company is under 50 employees, everyone on your team has real work to do every day that isn’t managing. In other words, you can’t have people on your team who can’t do actual work. You know, produce. Build stuff. Hammer.

You might be tempted to hire that awesome head of marketing with 20 years of experience, but can they execute a campaign? Do they know how to build and manage mailing lists? When’s the last time they had their hands in the mud? Can they get into the weeds all of the tech you’re using and dig through results?

It’s doubly true for your tech team leadership. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, technologists are expensive and anyone who’s taking a lot of cash out of the business better be able to draw at least a crooked line between the work they did today and money coming in tomorrow. Second, good (great) developers want to work for someone who really knows their sh*t. There’s nothing worse than having to explain something basic to someone who you report to. Confidence erodes quickly, and the team will turn toxic.

Experience is important, and having good leaders is critical, but everyone has to be able to pick up a hammer and do the work.

P.S. Thanks for your patience with some of the whackiness in the schedule lately. Ghosts in the machine.