pawelpiotrowski

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AUTHORITATIVE VS. AUTHORITARIAN LEADERSHIP: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

The authoritative leadership style gets a bad rap — probably because it’s frequently confused with the authoritarian leadership style. While the two terms are similar, the approaches are quite different:

 Authoritative leadership: The leader sets a goal and encourages the team to work together to achieve it, leading by example and balancing autonomy with support.

Authoritarian leadership: The leader sets a goal and the exact path to get there, expecting employees to comply with strict directives without voicing concerns or disagreement.

Harvard Business School summarizes it perfectly: “Authoritative leaders say, ‘Come with me;’ authoritarian leaders say, ‘Do what I tell you.’”

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[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669&utm_term=comment]

I have a 4-quardrant way of thinking about this that's similar.

- Y-axis is "drive"

- X-axis is "aptitude"

- low drive + low aptitude: never hire

- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise

- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth

- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot

There's an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity and lack of ego. My experience has been that candidates with high curiosity tend to have low ego (they know what they don't know and are curious to learn). These candidates make great hires because you can teach them anything.

Wrote about this a little bit here (with a handy diagram): https://charliedigital.com/2020/01/15/effective-hiring-for-small-or-all-teams/

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The Procrastinator The Lone Wolf The Negative Nancy The Over-Promiser The Know-It-All The Silent Type The Perfectionist The Unreliable One The Conflict Instigator The Burned-Out Employee

One powerful communication tool I've found particularly useful is Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, NVC is a method of communication that promotes empathy and understanding.

At its core, NVC involves four steps: Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request.

Observation involves stating the facts we observe that are affecting our well-being.

Feeling is about sharing how we feel in relation to what we observe.

Need is expressing what we need or value that is causing our feelings.

Request involves clearly requesting what we want without demanding it.

In a management context, NVC can be a game-changer. It can help you communicate effectively with your team, constructively address issues, and build strong, positive relationships.

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1) 2) 3) ... 10) You will profit more from good soft skills than from good technical skills

Technical skills are the ones you can learn easily. With different projects, you can understand a particular programming language. You can learn its syntax, pros and cons. It's just a matter of practice.

On the other hand, soft skills are much harder to improve. Improvement takes a lot of mental strength. You must do things you are not comfortable with.

You have to put yourself in situations where you can improve or practice particular soft skills.

For example, communication is one soft skill that people always talk about. Let's say you suck at public speaking. You have to force yourself into situations where you can practice some public speaking.

It's very hard to intentionally put yourself into situations where you know you will suck at. Your mind will do everything to avoid those situations. It will bring hundreds of excuses and it's easy to give up.

Besides communication, there are other soft skills:

teamwork

learning mindset

organization/time management

emotional intelligence/empathy

approachability

persistence/patience

confidence

I have met a lot of folks who are good with technical skills but awful to work with.

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Dropbox, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, Shopify, StackOverflow - these companies and others started out as monolithic code bases. Many have a monolith at their core to this day.

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0 - the number of times you should lie 0 - the number of pages your team should get off hours 1 - the number of times you should try to reverse a sincere resignation 2 - minimum number of direct reports anyone should ever have 3 - the minimum number of candidates you should interview before making a decision 4 - the number of minutes to spend on chit chat in the beginning of a meeting 5 - the number of comments on a document before you should ask to talk about the issue 6 - the number people tell you when they’re very unhappy 7 - the number of days before a new hire should have merged a pull request 8 - the % of people that should be rated as underperforming in a growth company during a bull market 10 - the max % you should be looking to negotiate an offer 30 - the number of days before a small support issue becomes a large support issue 50 - the number of Pull Requests a solid engineer should merge per 6 months 70 - the target % close rate for recruiting in a “regular” market 90 - the number of days a role should stay open 100 - the way you should keep it 200 - the maximum size of “small data” 500 - the number of employees before your CEO becomes a political figure 1000 - the size of company when you’re at risk of losing accountability 3905 - the average number of days from initial funding to IPO, for companies that make it

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Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. (...)  Snacking isn’t necessarily bad, a certain amount gives you energy to redeploy against more impactful tasks, but you do have to be careful to avoid overindulging.

To catch my own reminiscing, I find I really need to write out my weekly priorities, and look at the ones that keep slipping. Why am I avoiding that work, and is it more important than what I’m doing instead? If a given task slips more than two weeks, then usually I’m avoiding it, and it’s time to figure out where I’m spending time reminiscing.

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The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you.

Work at MIT found that brainstorming generally “reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones.”

I think Business with a capital B loves “collaboration” because of the seeming evidence of the feat: the potential for innovation is visible, even palpable when people are in a room — “I can see people meeting and talking and there are sticky notes all over the wall!”.

The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t “look” like work. Even more so if it’s away from your computer. However, my own process for brainstorming and ideating often looks like this:

Load my brain with all the context of a problem.

Step away from the computer and go live — do the dishes, go for a run, vacuum the carpet.

Once potential solutions distill in my mind, go back to my desk and write them down or sketch them out.

Prepare a presentation, demo, or prototype to convey my idea to others and gather their feedback.

Rinse & repeat.

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more than 75 percent of college-educated workers believe that passion is an important factor in career decision making. And 67 percent of them say they would prioritize meaningful work over job stability, high wages, and work-life balance. Believers in this idea trust that passion will inoculate them against the drudgery of working long hours on tasks that they have little personal connection to. For many, following their passion is not only a path to a good job; it is the key to a good life.

frankly, the white-collar labor force was not designed to help workers nurture self-realization projects. It was designed to advance the interests of an organization’s stockholders. When people place paid employment at the center of their meaning-making journey, they hand over control of an essential part of their sense of self to profit-seeking employers and the ebbs and flows of the global economy.

Recommending that career aspirants do what they love and figure out the “employment stuff” later (...) ignores the structural obstacles to economic success that many face, and blames career aspirants if they cannot overcome obstacles. It guides workers to avoid the grind of paid work by transforming it into a space of fulfillment. But it does nothing to address the factors that make paid work feel like drudgery in the first place. Many companies also tend to exploit workers’ passion. My research finds that employers prefer workers who find their jobs fulfilling, precisely because passionate employees often provide additional uncompensated labor.

In order to circumvent the existential problems of passion, individuals can shift their personal philosophies about work. One solution is to trim paid work to fit into a more confined space in our lives: Work that can be contained in predictable hours, that provides freedom to engage in meaningful outside activities, and that allows ample time for friends, family, and hobbies may be a more desirable and self-preserving goal.

The more pertinent question, then, isn’t “How can I change my career path to do work that I love?” but rather “How can I wrangle my work to leave me with more time and energy for the things and people that bring me joy?” 

No one should entrust the bulk of their sense of self to a single social intuition, especially one within something as tempestuous as the labor market.

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At the highest level, called the “Portfolio”, SAFe does advocate funding indefinite “Value Streams”. However, the Lean Portfolio Management function that controls funding are given sole authority to approve which Portfolio Epics (large initiatives) move into each stream. Epics are not explanations about a problem that needs to be solved. They are pre-formed ideas about how best to solve those problems.

SAFe collects small product teams (often Scrum teams) into “Agile Release Trains” — groups of teams with an additional layer of management roles spanning each group at what is called the “Program level”.

Generally these roles impede the autonomy of teams. They add process and communication overhead out of proportion with the value they provide.

Right away we can see signs of the old-school mindset of viewing teams as a “delivery” function instead of a strategic one. The high level thinkers come up with ideas, and the low level doers execute on those ideas. Ignored is the possibility that those closest to the work might be best equipped to make decisions about it.

The Product Owner and team might theoretically be able to prioritize other, smaller pieces of work against the work imposed on them, but these efforts have limited visibility and buy-in from above.

SAFe actually chooses to manage dependencies is by increasing focus on planning, process, hierarchy, and standardization. Predictably, this results in lots of meetings that interfere with the ability to get work done. It imposes this approach through a universal roll-out that affects the entire organization at once.

There is definitely some value in having people get together in person to build relationships, share information, and orient around goals. On the other hand, using that limited time window to make 10 week plans of specific user stories based on pre-defined features, and then requiring commitment to those plans is much less valuable.

As soon as PI planning ends, those plans created based on limited understanding and numerous assumptions will become obsolete as soon as anything new is learned. Teams will be continuously torn between sticking to the plan they’ve learned doesn’t make sense and and reorienting expectations for reasons those above them may not be in a position to understand.

Roles at the program level and above cannot possibly attend all team retrospectives. This means retrospectives will not be directly heard by the people who can actually change many of the things being discussed.

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As a Novice going for Junior, you had to prove you could fix bugs without too much supervision;

Going for Senior, you had to prove you could implement a whole design with little supervision;

Going for Staff, you had to show you could produce designs based on business problems with basically no management;

Going for Senior Staff, you had to solve bigger and bigger business problems; and so on.

People who are naturally excellent at glue work often stall out early in the prescribed engineering pipeline, even when they'd be great in later stages (staff engineers, directors, and executives) that traditional engineers struggle at. In fact, it's well documented that an executive in a tech company requires almost a totally different skill set than a programmer, and rising through the ranks doesn't prepare you for that job at all. Many big tech companies hire executives from outside the company, and sometimes even from outside their own industry, for that reason.

In systems design, there is rarely a single right answer that applies everywhere. But with centralized vs distributed systems, my rule of thumb is to do exactly what Jo Freeman suggested: at least make sure the control structure is explicit. When it's explicit, you can debug it.

Chicken-egg problems

Video game console makers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) have become skilled at this; they're the only ones I know who do it on purpose every few years. Some tricks they use are:

Subsidizing the cost of early console sales.

Backward compatibility, so people who buy can use older games even before there's much native content.

Games that are "mostly the same" but "look better" on the new console.

Compatible gamepads between generations, so developers can port old games more easily.

"Exclusive launch titles": co-marketing that ensures there's value up front for consumers (new games!) and for content producers (subsidies, free advertising, higher prices).

The next level up is a two-sided market, such as Uber or Ebay. Nobody can get a ride from Uber unless there are drivers; but drivers don't want to work for Uber unless they can get work. Uber has to attract both kinds of users (and worse: in the same geographic region! at the same time of day!) before either kind gets anything from the deal. 

The most difficult level I know is a three-sided market. For example, UberEats connects consumers, drivers, and restaurants. Getting a three-sided market rolling is insanely complicated, expensive, and failure-prone.

Second-system effect

Second system effect arises through the following steps:

An initial product starts small and is built incrementally, starting with a low budget and a few users.

Over time, the product gains popularity and becomes profitable.

The system evolves, getting more and more hacks on top, and early design tradeoffs start to be a bottleneck.

The engineers figure out a new design that would fix all the mistakes we know about, plus more! (And they're probably right.)

Since the product is already popular, it's easy to justify spending the time to "do it right this time" and "build a strong platform for the next 10 years." So a project is launched to rewrite everything from scratch. It's expected to take several months, maybe a couple of years, and a big engineering team.

The results are remarkably consistent:

The project takes longer than expected to reach feature parity.

The new design often does solve the architectural problems in the original; however, it unexpectedly creates new architectural problems that weren't in the original.

Development time is split (or different developers are assigned) between maintaining the old system and launching the new system.

As the project gets increasingly overdue, project managers are increasingly likely to shut down the old system to force users to switch to the new one, even though users still prefer the old one.

Innovator's dilemmas

A summary of the Innovator's Dilemma is as follows:

You (Intel in this case) make an awesome product in a highly profitable industry.

Some crappy startup appears (ARM in this case) and makes a crappy competing product with crappy specs. The only thing they seem to have going for them is they can make some low-end garbage for cheap.

As a big successful company, your whole business is optimized for improving profits and margins. Your hard-working employees realize that if they cede the ultra-low-end garbage portion of the market to this competitor, they'll have more time to spend on high-valued customers. As a bonus, your average margin goes up!Genius.

The next year, your competitor's product gets just a little bit better, and you give up the new bottom of your market, and your margins and profits further improve. This cycle repeats, year after year. (We call this "retreating upmarket.")

The crappy competitor has some kind of structural technical advantage that allows their performance (however you define performance; something relevant to your market) to improve, year over year, at a higher percentage rate than your product can. And/or their product can do something yours can't do at all (in ARM's case: power efficiency).

Eventually, one year, the crappy competitor's product finally exceeds the performance metrics of your own product, and promptly blows your entire fucking company instantly to smithereens.

The dilemma comes from the fact that all large companies are heavily optimized to discard ideas that aren't as profitable as their existing core business. Any company that doesn't optimize like this fails; by definition their profitability would go down. So thousands of worker bees propose thousands of low-margin and high-margin projects, and the company discards the former and invests heavily in the latter (this is called "sustaining innovation" in the book), and they keep making more and more money, and all is well.

Fancy expensive databases were the only way to get high transaction throughput, until SSDs came along and made any dumb database fast enough for most jobs.

Complicated database indexes and schemas were great until AWS came along and let everyone just brute force mapreduce everything using short-term rental VMs.

JITs were mostly untenable until memory was so much slower than CPU that compiling was not the expensive part. Software-based network packet processing on a CPU was slower than custom silicon until generic CPUs got fast enough relative to RAM. And so on.

But in the book, it had a meaning. There are two kinds of innovations: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining is the kind that big companies are great at. If you want to make the fastest x86 processor, nobody does it better than Intel (with AMD occasionally nipping at their heels). Intel has every incentive to keep making their x86 processors better. They also charge the highest margins, which means the greatest profits, which means the most money available to pour into more sustaining innovation. There is no dilemma; they dump money and engineers and time into that, and they mostly deliver, and it pays off.

A "disruptive" innovation was meant to refer to specifically the kind you see in that plot up above: the kind where an entirely new thing sucks for a very long time, and then suddenly and instantly blows you away. This is the kind that creates the dilemma.

If you're a startup and you think you have a truly disruptive innovation, then that's great news for you. It's a perfect answer to that awkward investor question, "What if [big company] decides to do this too?" because the honest truth is "their own politics will tear that initiative apart from the inside."

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Overreaction is Often Driven by Something Else Entirely

Blame is Often Driven by Anger

Anxiety comes from not seeing the full picture.

Avoidance is Often Driven by Insecurity

Criticism is Often Driven by Shame

Unrequested Advice is Often Driven by Regret

Mistrust is Often Driven by an Unspoken Expectation

Doubt is Often Driven by a Lack of Clarity

Selflessness is Often Driven by Guilt

Every Negative Emotion is Driven by an Unmet Need

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In the old days, if you were a white-collar worker, the deal was that you worked as hard as you could at the start of your career to earn the right to be rewarded later on, with security of tenure and a series of increasingly senior positions. This is no longer true. Today, many senior leaders work longer and harder than ever. 

My research (...) shows that our tendency to overwork and burn out is framed by a complex combination of factors involving our profession, our organization, and ourselves. At the heart of it is insecurity.

A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations

Exacerbating this problem, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers” — some leading professional organizations explicitly use this terminology, though not in public. Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well.

In the short term, insecure overachievers respond by delivering exceptional performance.

The tendency to hard work is reinforced by the strong culture of social control created by elite professional organizations. On the one hand, this is comforting. Some professionals I have studied refer to their firms as being like a “family,” or something even more intense.

Paradoxically, the professionals I studied still believe that they have autonomy and that they are overworking by choice. They do not blame their organizations, which after all have invested in work-life balance initiatives and wellness programs. Instead, they blame themselves for being inadequate

As a result, by the time insecure overachievers become leaders of their organizations, they unconsciously replicate the systems of social control and overwork that helped to create them.

Your insecurities may have helped to get you where you are today, but are they still working for you? Is it time to acknowledge that you have “made it” and to start enjoying the experience a little bit more? And if your boss is an insecure overachiever, recognize how they are projecting their insecurity onto you — how they make you feel insecure for not being able to keep up with them.

Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.

If you are a leader, you have a responsibility not just to your firm but to the people who work within it. Help your colleagues to achieve their full potential, but do not allow yourself to exacerbate and exploit their insecurities. And remember that your ultimate “duty of care” is to yourself.

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Autonomy for software engineers and teams. The expectation of developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it's to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.

Curious problem solvers, not mindless resources. A motivated engineer easily makes multiple times the impact of a "factory worker" who only does what they’re told.  For organizations with a factory worker attitude, this approach will bias towards more heavyweight project management approaches that leave little room for interpretation, on purpose.

Internal data, code, and documentation transparency. Employees – and not just engineers – often have access to real time business metrics and data sources, to write their own queries and create custom reports.

Exposure to the business and to business metrics. Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business.

Engineer-to-engineer comms over triangular-communication.Traditional companies will encourage hierarchical communication that slows down information flow, and results in slower decisions.

Investing in a less frustrating developer experience. Companies that care about engineers solving problems quickly set up various platform teams, which reduce the developer experience churn.

Higher pay, justified by higher leverage. Companies that leverage engineers well, have no trouble paying close to the top of the market, or above it.

Caliber of the talent hired. These companies hire highly competent and highly motivated people, thanks to the combination of all the above. They have a large pool to choose from, as they are known for generous compensation packages, and strong career growth opportunities.

Empowered and autonomous teams are the building blocks of all these companies. They are also the key differentiator between many companies in the tech industry.

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When choosing your next company, first determine which stage (pre-product fit, post-product fit, growth, or scale) is the best match. Usually only 1 or 2 stages make sense for any given job search.

Post-product fit companies need functional experts who can introduce stability.

People who thrive here can introduce the right amount of structure and process without frustrating founders and entrepreneurs.

Growth is taking place slowly and consistently, and many areas of expertise are completely missing and unstaffed.

If you are five to 10 years into your career, you are unlikely to be a director or executive in a late-stage company. But at this phase, if you get hired, you might be more experienced than anyone in the company and can lead a team. It’s the trade-off between being a crew member on an ocean liner versus captain of a small vessel.

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I’m writing this article for the nice people in leadership roles. By the meaning of the word “nice,” such people are kind, polite, and friendly. They generally trust the goodness of the people they lead. They are not usually difficult to work with, care for others, are patient, and listen. They venture to be vulnerable. You don’t hesitate to approach them.

Here are the six leadership styles.

Coercive: This style demands immediate compliance. You get told more often than being asked about what you think. This style hurts the climate.

Authoritative: This style mobilizes people towards a vision. They motivate people through vision and work to maximize your commitment to goals. You would know how your work is contributing to the broader vision. This style has the most positive impact on the climate.

Affiliative: This style creates harmony and builds emotional bonds with the people. Under such leadership, people share ideas and their inspiration with one another. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.

Democratic: This style forges consensus through participation. This style is characterized by listening to people and getting their buy-in to drive flexibility and responsibility, even if it takes more time. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.

Pacesetting: This style sets high standards for performance and creates “do as I do, now” pressure on people in an “I know it all” mode. Of course, this style also harms the climate.

Coaching: This style develops people for the future. In this style, you will see delegation get challenging assignments. You will be lucky to work with such leaders since you grow. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.

He identifies that authoritative, democratic, affiliative, and coaching styles have “the best climate and business performance.” The other two styles, coercive and pacesetting, hurt the climate. I’m sure you all have worked with or for managers that employed these two negative styles, and you could not run away from them fast enough.

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Becoming a great executive requires a set of skills beyond what's needed to be a leader. Executive skills are subtle and can be elusive to managers, demanding a great deal of focus, courage, and dedication. These skills include taking (almost irrational) career risk, learning to scale by trusting your team, and developing advanced soft skills. New skills are hard for leaders to develop simply because they’ve already found success, which makes them less motivated to make substantive skill shifts. But those who see change as a path to growth will ascend to top roles within an organization.

Ideally, your career will go through three acts. Act I is the “setup.” It’s where you transition from being an individual contributor to a leader. Act II is your transition from a leader to an executive. And Act III is where you start your second career, hopefully unconstrained by previous financial and personal needs.

most leaders, like clockwork, complete Act I roughly 10 to 15 years after they enter the workforce. Not everyone ends up as a leader, but those who rise to that level follow a pretty consistent timeline. Some start fast, lucky enough to land in a rapidly growing environment and be supported by a good manager and team, and are able to quickly move from learning a skill to mastering it

unlike in the first dozen years, career paths become highly inconsistent. Some people continue to rise, but most will stall or even decline. This is highly unintuitive, but in reviewing the careers of a myriad of leaders, I see he’s absolutely right

When you reach Act II, you’re comfortable and have a successful career. But to grow, you need new experiences, which likely means you need to change jobs. Change now takes courage and significant risk—you have more to lose than you had in Act I. So most prefer to avoid making big changes, resulting in fewer new challenges and much slower growth than they experienced in Act I.

Now fast-forward 10 to 15 years, after you’ve purchased your first or second home and you’ve established roots in that particular city. What will it take to move again? No doubt, we could always move again to a bigger, better home. But it’s more of a luxury than a necessity. So many people simply don’t do it, instead being content with staying the course, avoiding the pain and cost of moving, and focusing their energies elsewhere.

Getting things done in a workplace is some combination of what you know (“IQ,” or hard skills) and how to use your knowledge (“EQ,” or soft skills). Act I is where you build out functional expertise. For a software developer, it’s how to effectively write quality code, tackle more complex technical problems, work in a team, and eventually manage a group of individuals. For a product manager, it’s how to run a meeting, set goals and direction, drive accountability, and deliver useful products to end users. 

to grow you must take risks and constantly put yourself in new, challenging, and increasingly ambiguous settings. Your current expertise will help navigate these new roads, but you’ll need to build new talents and adjust your existing skills to truly excel. Most leaders don’t have an intense desire to reinvent themselves—they’d prefer to continue pushing on the skills that made them a leader to begin with. But new challenges require new approaches that fit the new environment, not just replicating the past

The majority of my leadership coaching is to help people manage these anxieties and frustrations. These include:

“I get nearly zero feedback so I feel like I don’t belong.”

“The company simply doesn’t acknowledge my importance. It’s taking far too much time to get promoted, increase my compensation or my scope.”

“I’m frustrated by how slow it takes to make things happen.” Or, “The bureaucracy around here is crippling.”

“I just don’t understand my tenured co-workers. They just feel so stuck in their ways, unable to consider new ideas.” Or I hear, “These new people just have no sense of how things are done around here. They are impatient and shoot before they aim.”

With this added responsibility, at first you might just end up working harder and increasing your level of engagement. Up to this point, your success has mainly come from making good decisions and mastering the details. So naturally, as the problem space gets bigger, you increase focus and absorb more context. Sadly, there are only so many hours in a day and your capacity is finite. So on your path to becoming an executive, mastering each detail will hold you back. You’ll need to develop a new, crucial skill: building teams and trusting the people in them.

So to scale yourself, you will need to recruit leaders who can work and thrive under you, likely from outside the company. And you’ll need to learn to trust them, even when you don’t have full context. Leaders who are scaling learn:

how to prioritize and be efficient with their time

invest in finding and managing great people

dive in at the right altitude

how to make the right decisions by asking just the right questions

After reading the challenges that come with Act II, please don’t feel discouraged from pursuing an executive career path. If you are in Act I, do your best to recognize and pull forward the skills noted above. And if you are in Act II, realize that career growth will rapidly decelerate by default. To keep pace and continue to grow, you will need to aggressively seek new talents and skills.