Everyday leadership

I recently watched Drew Dudleys Everyday leadership TED talk. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it more. Bonus is it’s only 5 minutes, so no excuses.

It got me thinking about people I’ve worked with who’ve changed my life for the better, dramatically. Especially the ones who don’t even realise it.

18 years ago I returned from an epic year abroad, one where I took off to explore parts of the world still left largely untouched at the time. I got back and did not have a plan. One of my friends, James, was a producer at Electronic Arts, he thought I’d be a good fit for a job there. He advocated for me, I interviewed and got the role. He let me stay in his spare room and my life was changed forever. I didn’t realise technology and interactive entertainment were my calling, it wasn’t a job, it was a life filled with amazing people and experiences. I will always be grateful.

I moved onto Microsoft years later where two people changed my life significantly, a real life Microsoft upgrade without the blue screening.

At Microsoft I found a learning centre. A room filled with books, cds, magazines and free courses. Not only that, it was managed by real librarians, ones that knew everything, not just the location of books on shelves. The manager even did free research papers on any subject, I was like a 4 year old at Legoland.

David, the manager, would make recommendations to me based on his growing understanding of my passions and interest (he made Amazon’s recommendation algorithms look amateur). One day he asked if I’d read The Four Hour Work Week, a fairly recent book by Tim Ferris, a new author at the time. The moment David handed me that audio cd, my life literally changed forever, I’m still benefiting from his introduction.

“There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it”- Simon Sinek

Alan Page worked at Microsoft, he unknowingly helped me get my job there. He was one of the authors of ‘How we test software at Microsoft’, a book that became my bible for getting into Team Xbox (it’s completely outdated now so I no longer recommend it). I followed his blog (still do) and later he co-founded a podcast named AB Testing. By that time I was about to head up the quality effort on the biggest game franchise in the world – Minecraft – where I wanted a modern, future proof model. Alan, as well as the AB testing podcast, inspired a whole new direction for the impact of my work.

It didn’t end there, he left Microsoft for a role at Unity and when Unity approached me last year, I reached out to Alan who then helped me understand the company from the inside. This helped my decision to join. I now get to work with him again and secretly use him as a mentor without him realising it (unless he reads this blog of course).

Everyday we have the power to change people’s lives, we’re all leaders. Change big and small has a knock on effect, it’s always astounding yet we’ll rarely directly know or see the ripples of smaller change.

Let’s not put leadership on a pedestal, we all have greatness, we’re all leaders.

The price of greatness is responsibility – Winston Churchill