Episode 61: Lena Reinhard (CircleCI)

Authority Issues

In this episode, Kendall, rachel, and Lena talk about:

• Starting out in finance, the arts, classic cars journalism, and more...
• Uses (appropriate or not) for creativity in leadership
• Realizing that a potential lifelong career in banking would be...boring
• First startup experience as a web copywriter
• First formal leadership experience as a bootstrapped startup CEO
• Ebola outbreak response...no biggie, right?!
• Becoming more intentional as a leader, learning about leadership frameworks
• Growing out of the 'relationship' as a cofounder, wanting different things
• Big, International, Complicated :)
• Becoming a regular old Engineering Manager, and...immediately becoming a VP of Engineering
• Twitter as a source of leadership learning, despite the trashfire
• Managing in all directions, 360 degree leadership
• Acknowledging that leadership successes depend on the quality of the team
• Hiring tenets, "value add" vs "culture fit"
• Finding the right role at CircleCI
• Authority and how to swing it, understanding power distance
• Maintaining a list of hobbies to take up as a hobby
• A strong desire for "really good fries"
• A recommendation for poetry books by Omar Sakr, more books recommended below
• Working on dialing back the tendency to take charge in non-work life (such a familiar struggle :))

More books Lena recommends:

• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50887097-why-fish-don-t-exist
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43131602-into-the-planet
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39731655-in-extremis

You can find Lena on the internet at:

• http://twitter.com/lrnrd
• https://lenareinhard.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenareinhard/

Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3