Mick Philippon

The term Technical Direction is evocative. Leading a team means knowing how to guide it towards the most beneficial destination for the company, while taking into account the specificities of people and human relationships in all their complexity. It is therefore necessary to be able to clearly express the objectives, the constraints, and the thinking that led to the organizational and practical choices that must be implemented in order to gain the support of the people being led.

It is also a matter of trust. Trust in one's subordinates, who are themselves managers, Tech leads, architects, to make the right decisions, to support their team in achieving the defined objectives, without forgetting that trust does not exclude control. And therefore to implement procedures that allow, in complete transparency, the escalation of alerts and setbacks that inevitably occur in the life of a project in order to act as quickly as possible to achieve the set objectives.

Among my favorite maxims, three stand out:

1/ "Better to ask for forgiveness than permission": encourage initiatives, maintain a positive spirit and do not stifle teams;

2/ "Praise in public, reprimand in private": stigmatizing failure leads to general paralysis. Except for serious misconduct, it is better to correct the course in individual interviews and let the teams observe the improvement;

3/ "Find solutions rather than culprits": To be related to the previous maxim. That being said, to err is human. It is therefore important, in a constructive spirit, to seek above all to resolve the difficulties that errors may pose rather than focusing on punishing the culprits. This comes later, once the problem is solved, if it is necessary to take human actions for observed deficiencies.