
CTO, become happy again!
Simple ways to regain happiness
Many of my CTO clients no longer feel happy in their role. They lack motivation or are even near burnouts (ask a professional!)
First about motivation. People have the false notion that motivation is a state that you are in or not. And to get something done, they need to get into the state of motivation.
Nothing could be farer from the truth. There is no motivation, it’s an illusion, like white light. There is only Joy and (Self-) Discipline. You either enjoy something doing, or you need self-discipline to do it. Sometimes joy follows doing.
The other thing about happiness from work, you need to see progress. If you’re swamped with many small tasks and meetings, you don’t see progress and that makes you unhappy.
To cure that root of unhappiness, do one big thing a day. In the morning, think “What would make this day count. What would move me forward.” Find that one big thing for the day, do it, and you will feel happier in the evening. Because you’ve made significant progress.
General things out of the way, let’s look specifically at CTOs. The CTO got into engineering, tech and software development because they loved tinkering with things, making broken things work, think about challenging problems and solve complex ones. Perhaps even from childhood on.
We’re coders at heart. CTOs started as coders and then moved up the ladder. Each rung of the ladder took away from the things that brought them into tech. No more coding. No more tinkering. No more complex problems. Mostly slide decks, meetings and politics.
Moving up the ladder brought more and more work. So they either delegated a lot, or burned out (or got me as a coach ;-) But they delegated everything that brought joy, so nothing is left. And discipline wears thin over time.
Developers also struggle with boring work that brings no joy (another pixel for marketing, hurray!) Developers Copium for boredom: New frameworks, more elaborate abstractions, neat solutions to problems that don’t need to be solved, tech migrations. But what is the Copium for CTOs? None in sight.
Stuck with boring things? There is no need to think in layers. “This is my layer of work, this is developers work”. Go where you think you can provide the best value.
Second, you can do interesting things, while still fulfilling your job requirements (vision & strategy, sync with business, engineering culture, scaling, people development):
- Prototypes Build a prototype for a new product, show it around to the management board. Convince them to move the company into a new field or direction. Successful companies have tech innovation as one of their drivers (beside business and product innovation).
- Spikes Build a spike for a new technology or complex problem, then hand it over into the development process. It’s important to have a defined way how your work flows into the normal development process, otherwise it is stuck.
- Developer outreach Talk to developers outside the company. Build an employer brand, make recruiting easier. Talk to developers about tricky tech problems at conferences. I once listened to Werner Vogels talking about tech problems at a VC conference (he also clapped his hands during my talk, woha!)
- Tech scouting Try out new technologies to see if they work. I was doing this with Windows Phone. And IoT. And Alexa. And the first iPhone. Can you use health data to optimize your meditation app?
- What not to do? Write code in production if you spend less than 50% of your time coding. You’re going to either slow down other developers or make grave mistakes.
With this, joy comes back and not everything needs to rely on discipline.