014. Answering to Senior Management

How to practice extreme leadership with the higher-ups.

As a technical leader, it’s inevitable that you’ll find yourself answering to senior management from time to time in a variety of situations – some more pleasant than others. Besides the (hopefully frequent) occasions of discussing your great success, there will likely be the occasional time when your team fell short of expectations, or when you’ve taken on more than you can handle. In other editions of this newsletter, we discussed how to mitigate these latter two situations with strategies like prioritization and delegation. In this edition, I’ll discuss how you can take ownership and answer to senior management when these cases do arise.