Photo by Paul Hohnen

Steve Alexander

“Steve can walk into a room full of brilliant developers and powerful senior managers all with sensitive egos and say things nobody else would dare to say, in a way that dissolves tension and gets people engaging productively.”
Elliot Murphy, Vice President of Core Development and Operations at Canonical

Steve Alexander is a consultant who works with managers and visionaries, helping them see clearly, make bold choices, and develop responsive connections with those around them.

He has worked in the software industry as a senior manager (managing other managers) and a software architect, for desktop, server and web software that is used by millions of users around the world.

Steve is trained in co-active coaching, has studied Leadership and Self-Deception at Work with the Arbinger institute, and has extensive training as an actor. Steve is equally comfortable being on stage, in an executive boardroom, or around a whiteboard talking animatedly with developers and interaction designers.

Leadership

“I would hire Steve into any leadership position on the spot.”
Joey Stanford, Engineering Programme Manager at Linaro, previously OEM Operations Manager at Canonical and Senior Project Manager at IBM

“Steve's biggest talent is seeing connections between seemingly unrelated challenges and resources and offering the right people a chance to contribute to a solution.”
Elliot Murphy, Vice President of Core Development and Operations at Canonical

Steve is an experienced leader with the skills to help others realize their strengths and develop their own leadership style. His own style is to get a rich feel for the big picture strategy and the rationale that supports it, while at the same time taking opportunities to get into the nuts-and-bolts of the work and stay connected with what he's asking of others.

He's developed front-of-room speaking skills from large amounts of voice and acting training, learning stage presence, camera technique and communication through movement and posture. Steve is always looking for new insights and deeper learning. During 2011 he is taking the CTI Leadership programme, a 10 month programme about honouring personal values, coping with confrontation, collaborating with others, and manifesting your personal leadership in the workplace.

Management and Team building

“Steve understands how to raise feelings of safety to encourage participation, challenge people to take on uncomfortable topics, and get down to the real details of figuring out how to make progress - whether on a technical problem, a personnel issue, or a business strategy.”
Elliot Murphy, Vice President of Core Development and Operations at Canonical

Steve has a talent for handling interpersonal issues delicately but effectively, in many cases leading to people becoming more influential in the company, matching their technical excellence with learning how to inspire others to action. He has managed other managers, and coached them in relating to their direct reports, on their work/life balance and on working in “virtual teams” working over the internet and meeting in person for intensive design and development meetings every few months. Steve has been a speaker at conferences about working on distributed teams and the related topic of combining agile software development with lessons from successful open source projects.

Technology

“He knows his way around a debugger and has razor sharp logic whether reviewing system architecture or an emergency code patch going out to millions of users. He is a native of the modern web, and has an unrelenting passion for making both software that people love to use, and companies that people love to work in.”
Elliot Murphy, Vice President of Core Development and Operations at Canonical

Steve has managed large technical projects, doing everything from long-term strategic planning to hands-on code reviews and making operational plans for deployment and QA. He's worked with teams using agile methods, both for open source and proprietary software development. He's also taken Poppendiek's LEAN Leader's Workshop, and applied these principles to a large development team over several years.

Steve holds a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering, is a member of the International Coaching Federation, and lives in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.