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4

Leading and Human-ing in 2024 — with Lena Reinhard

Refactoring Podcast — Season 1 • Episode 1
4

This episode is brought to you by 📊 Swarmia, the engineering effectiveness platform for modern software organizations.


🙋‍♀️ Today’s guest

Lena Reinhard has dedicated her career to helping technology leaders build successful engineering organizations.

Her background includes roles such as VP of Engineering at CircleCI and TravisCI, along with being a co founder and CEO of a SaaS startup. She now works as a leadership coach, management trainer, and organizational developer.

Lena has supported a diverse range of companies across the globe, from early stage startups to scale ups, corporations, and NGOs. In our chat, we discussed the current state of the tech industry, the role of leaders, and the importance of staying human.


Here are some topics and takeaways from our chat:

📉 Challenges in the tech industry

We talked about layoffs, the effects of the COVID pandemic, and economic downturns. We explored the role of venture capital and interest rates on the industry.

Shifts are also brought by younger generations (e.g. Gen Z) demanding different types of workplaces and environments. All these changes are predicted to impact the industry over the next few years.

🏡 Creating a healthy work environment

The culture set by a company dictates the kind of employees it attracts and retains.

There may exist different approaches to running a company, which may or may not prioritize employee well-being. However, prioritizing well-being shouldn’t mean sacrificing profits, as many successful companies show.

Leaders have a responsibility to push companies to do better, even though their ability to do so may be limited.

❤️ Taking care of yourself

Leaders need to practice self-care in order to effectively manage their teams.

Sometimes it’s hard to put on your own mask on first, or even to figure out how stressed you are. In the chat we discuss how important this is, how to identify burnout, and how to decompress.


🎙️ Episode

You can also watch the full episode on Youtube:

Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.


🙏 Thank you

Thank you so much for listening! Let us know what you think about the podcast in the comments or via email!

We just got started with the Podcast, so if you found this chat valuable, please consider subscribing to the show on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify.

Also, consider giving us a rating or leaving a review on the platform of your choice, as that really helps other listeners find the show.

See you next week! 👋
Luca

Discussion about this podcast

Refactoring
Refactoring Podcast
Interviews with world-class engineering leaders about writing great software and working well with humans.