In the Managed Services world, organizations often shoot themselves in both feet when selecting new leaders. We take our best engineers, rip them out of the technical role that they were rock stars in, and shove them into a new “leadership” role without taking the time to teach them the tools they need to succeed.

This leads to teams decreasing in efficiency as they lose a top-performing engineer and gain an inexperienced and struggling manager. Team morale decreases, turn over increases, and the new manager is left feeling deflated as they have been promoted into a role they often feel is impossible to be successful in.

This presentation is a collection of mistakes I made over the years as I went from good engineer to terrible manager, to a mostly OK manager that really just wants to prevent people from making the same dumb mistakes I did.

During this presentation, we will cover high-level topics like the importance of driving organizational and team culture (seriously – it IS important), how to transition from peer to leader, and how to manage up.

We will dive into tactical tools like using KPIs in a way that won’t make everyone hate you, choosing goals that people WANT to accomplish, and running meetings that don’t waste people's time (and are sometimes even kind of fun).

And if that’s not enough, along the way I will also teach you how to make the best damn ribs you have ever eaten. This presentation truly has something for everything.