Great leaders cause their staff to grow personally and professionally; they do this by finding out what keeps the staff from becoming all they can be, and remov

Great leaders cause their staff to grow personally and professionally; they do this by finding out what keeps the staff from becoming all they can be, and removing those barriers. This causes companies and the industry at large to grow. E.G. We used to have a general manager at where I worked some 30 years ago who handled a time theft case this way; he brought the guy into his office with a manager, laid down the time theft amount and days time theft occurred and gave the guy two options. Walk out the door, or work and pay it back; if you choose to be dishonest we have no use for you, leave. If you choose to be honest, pay it back, show me you can be a moral person, we're even. That person chose to pay it back, and they stayed with that company some 20 additional years. Any other quality is secondary. You don't have to know a library of algorithms or what the latest and greatest API is to be a great leader or even a competent programmer. Those things are distractions from understanding the fundamental theories and best practices of computer science anyway, and a lot of it is technological imperialism delivered through marketing to management already very aware technology needs to be inhibited for them to stay employed. Another very large organization I worked for had a standard software they had deployed all over the organization, and one department, a lab, had a bar-coding requirement for data entry to eliminate very costly problems that traced back to the lab. It wasn't my department's job to build infrastructure for them, and they had budgetary constraints that kept them from updating. I suggested they ask the staff to change the font of the text to a bar-code font which is something after doing 5 minutes of google research, I discovered the app allowed. I closed out the ticket and referenced that as a suggestion, and gave them the ticket to reference later. Lo and behold, 2 months later, they get a estimate for $50,000. This organization is one of the biggest employers in the US, and routinely mergers with another company about once every other year. There is no leadership in their organization, and we all suffer for it.