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Learn something new every day

Do you think leadership coaching could help you do your job better? Maybe I can be of assistance. I’m an experienced technology leader (see my resume) and I love to coach people. Do you want to know more? Please send me an e-mail at: me@anneke.com.

Leadership is a craft

I believe that leading a team is a craft, meaning it is learned through practice rather than reading books. I've been working in IT for over 25 years and I still learn something new every day. Most companies and organisations require IT, as it supports their primary processes. Since organisations are often reliant on these systems, many of them have their own IT departments. If you happen to be, like me, the leader of one of such teams, you’ll know that leading tech teams isn’t always easy. Why not? Because creating hardware and software is a complex task. Technology is constantly evolving, changing the market as well as IT development itself. As leader of an IT team, it is your responsibility to help your team navigate these constant changes.

High growth

So, what’s the best way to help a team grow? That is a question I have asked myself many times, and I have found a few decent answers. I won’t claim to have all the answers, but I gathered enough knowledge to help others become successful tech leaders. How did I learn these things? Mainly through practice.
Experiences I learned the most from were when I was given the responsibility to rapidly grow an IT team: in 2007 at TomTom Navigation Systems, in 2014 at Coolblue, an online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium, and in 2017 at Jumbo, one of the largest supermarkets in the Netherlands. In all these cases, my teams grew from several tens of developers to a few hundred within 2 to 3 years.

Quick learning

Why is guiding rapid growth such a valuable experience? Rapid growth means that you and your team have to be extremely flexible. You need to make decisions quickly, experiment, try things out, and correct what doesn’t work. This is when you quickly learn which (development) processes and which organisational structures work best and why. It also teaches you how you can help yourself and others maintain control over the workload, and why coaching your team is more effective than telling them what to do.

If the topics mentioned in the previous paragraph are things you are struggling with or if you have other questions that you believe I may be able to help you with, please let me know. I’d love to share my knowledge with you in one-on-one coaching sessions after office hours.