Humility

Don't pretend to be an expert.

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Being humble can greatly assist you in projects, as a manager, and in life. The examples provided in the last couple of podcasts spoke about deferring to the customer, true exercises in humility. What about in management? As a manager, it is unrealistic to think that you MUST be the expert in all the technology that your team is implementing. If you pretend that you are, you end up insulting those on your team that do have the information & experience. So defer to your team, even say “I haven’t had a chance to dig into that tech enough to answer your question but my team member here is the true expert.”. Let them lead you!

And in life? I quoted Epictetus in the last podcast and I just have to quote the man again here: “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” So to be blunt, if you are a know-it-all you will not learn anything new. You have to keep yourself open to new experiences, and in tech everything is changing all the time so just recognize now that even if everyone says you are the expert – you aren’t. It’s definitely ok to say you don’t know. You might think its counter intuitive because now the customer might think you aren’t adequate for their project, but I have seen 1000x that this only builds more trust with the customer because you are not just being humble, you are showing authenticity.

You know authenticity is a great subject for next time.

Until then stay safe everyone!