How to make 2018 the best year of your career?

"Failure is what I practice daily." Every successful executive (CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, VPs, etc.) I know or have ever worked with believes and lives this quote. Failing fast is a science, but being able to predict failure and success is both an art and a science at the same time. If you truly practice this, success becomes a habit. Recently, some folks from my team started working with a team on a multimillion dollar project for a corporation with multibillion dollar revenue. A few months into the initiative when I realized the team was ready to go to the next level, I decided to mentor them for seven straight days. We not only ended up breaking personal barriers, but also doubled the velocity of that sprint. Additionally, the code they wrote was done with best patterns and practices.

Success doesn't happen overnight and seldom does it happen alone. Success is ensured through a support system from within and from outside your organization. If you are not as successful as you would like to be, or want to be even more successful than you already are, please read this.

As a development manager or a VP, as a team lead or an architect, you have a lot on your plate every day. Most of you are given responsibilities that are humanly impossible for an individual to do. Theoretically, it seems like that won't be an issue as the higher-ups believe you have a team dedicated to getting it done. Take an example of recruiting. In the first place, you are recruiting to save time. Let's say, you are leading a team of three developers, one QA and one designer and need to hire two developers and one more QA. Seems easy; however, this is how it will play out in real life:

• The already busy developers and QA will be slammed by work and will have a hard time even creating the job description.
• Finding the right resumes to even interview can take up to a few weeks. Most recruiting companies have non-technical recruiters and they are naïve enough to call out developers faking experience on the other end.
• A few weeks later when no good candidates are selected, as a good manager, you take ownership of it and now change the job description. Sometimes, you will end up owning that task, on top of the already packed 80-hour a week schedule. Delay is inevitable.
• Now, it seems like you are getting more relevant resumes., but you may be still spending 20 hours with 20 different candidates interviewing them. A couple of weeks later you may be able to hire a few good candidates, but keep in mind, these resources may not be the best for the job. However, they were probably selected as they may have been the best available candidates you could find with the limited time and resources you had.
• As good managers, you may also be prone to trying out resources on a couple of positions and hope that you are able to train and mentor some new resources on the team.
• A few months later, it may turn out that some of them ended up being great, some average, and some may need to go.
• Delay has such an adverse effect sometimes that we won't even question ourselves. Why is our competitor able to hire better talent? What other pool of candidates couldn’t we tap? Could we have gotten world class talent at the price we are willing to pay? Maybe you think your company is not world class and can't compete with top corporations out there and feel better about the whole thing; however, the truth is you surely can.

It is very common to see above average techies end up being average managers and sometimes even failed executives. Let us help you make 2018 the best year of your career. (NOTE: For those outside Dallas, please note that I travel all over the country, Europe, Canada and Asia, so feel free to reach out).

I love Dallas as I went to school there and started my first multimillion dollar business there. It's my time to give back to Dallas. Next week, I will be in Dallas from December 17-22. I would love to meet development managers, architects, VPs, CTOs and other executives who really want to make a positive change in their companies and in their own career in 2018.

Please pick few times slots and send an email to (katie at chanderdhall dot com) with your company email and a preferred place of meeting:

• Tuesday, Dec. 19:
  • 9-10am
  • 10-11am
  • 11am-12pm
• Wednesday, Dec. 20:
  • 9-10am
  • 10-11am
  • 11am-12pm
• Thursday, Dec. 21:
  • 9-10am
  • 10-11am
  • 11am-12pm

If you are a student I will be in UTDallas every day between 1-7pm. Please feel free to connect.

Since the time slots are limited, I'm sure I won't be able to meet all of you. However, I will try my best to meet you sometime in the near future. And I hope to see you at our 7th annual conference in Dallas, MVP Mix (mvpmix.com). It's your opportunity to meet some very successful, world famous technologists.

Let’s do something great in 2018. Happy New Year!