Dave Kline

Become the Leader You’d Follow | Founder @ MGMT | Coach | Advisor | Speaker | Trusted by 250K+ leaders.

Hey, I’m Dave Kline.

I teach leaders how to build All-Star teams and level up their careers.

After decades of leading in pretty intense environments, from Bridgewater Associates to Moody’s Analytics, I know what it takes to be the manager your team remembers (for the right reasons).

Why I can help you is simple:

I’ve been through it.

And to prove it, here’s my background (by the numbers) ⤵️

2: Decades leading high-impact teams in asset management (Bridgewater), consulting (PwC), & financial services (Moody’s Analytics).

4: Years as an entrepreneur. My portfolio includes Skillscouter (an online course & career site), and MGMT Accelerator (a cohort-based management training course).

14: Cohorts of early-career leaders that I’ve taught at multiple companies.

100: Managers I recruited, onboarded & mentored at Bridgewater Associates.

1,000: Performance evaluations with grace and respect for stars and terminations alike.

205,000+: My community across LinkedIn & Twitter interested in management tactics & leadership lessons

385,000,000: My team’s top revenue year at Moody’s.

Now that we’ve covered the why, here’s the how:

- The MGMT Accelerator – an intensive management training course for both new and senior leaders
- MGMT Fundamentals – a course that covers all the need-to-know management basics for rookie leaders
- The MGMT Playbook – a weekly newsletter that gives practical management insights

Through our MGMT courses, my wife Marsden and I have played the assist with over 1,100 leaders so far, who’ve now learned how to:

- Practically tackle the most common leadership challenges
- Build their Management OS’s CODE (Coach, Operate, Delegate, Engage)
- Refine their individual leadership Decision-Making System

With our 30+ years of combined experience, you won’t just get our knowledge.

You’ll get to ask us questions directly and get access to coaching that’s more tailored to your own experience.

We always say – if we could do it like a dinner party, we would.

If you’re interested in leadership advice (that doesn’t just sound nice but actually works), drop me a follow – I post daily.

And if you like what you see, our MGMT courses could be just what you need to level up.

DM me if you’re interested.

Co-Founder

We created the MGMT Accelerator to help managers rapidly develop into trusted leaders by combining the art & science of management. 

This 4-week program consistents of eight 90-minute modules where I share the tactics I learned leading high-performing teams for 25 years. During each session, we tailor those insights together to build your personalized management system together. 

You'll learn alongside ~50 peers and become part of an expert community of more than 300 alums.

60% of managers fail.

Not because they lack talent.
But because they lack a clear map.

They're promoted and handed:

• No training
• No playbook
• No clarity

Just bigger responsibilities and higher expectations.

What makes it even harder?

Each management level isn't slightly different.
It's an entirely different game.

Same title. 
New rules.

And the cost of mistakes only goes up:

Team Lead Mistakes:
• Avoiding tough conversations
• Clinging to individual contributor work
• Missing early warning signals
• Failing to establish boundaries
• Prioritizing friendship over leadership

Manager Mistakes:
• Hiring too quickly, firing too slowly
• Choosing comfort over development
• Accepting mediocre performance
• Neglecting succession planning
• Navigating politics poorly

Manager of Managers Mistakes:
• Overlooking strategic opportunities
• Creating silos instead of connections
• Choosing the wrong battles
• Drowning in tactical details
• Controlling information flow

But beneath all three levels?

Core capabilities anyone can learn:

Emotional Intelligence
• Navigate conflict effectively
• Manage up with intention
• Read the room and adjust

Quality Decisions
• Gather the right inputs
• Move with purpose
• Deliver

Clear Communication
• Right audience
• Right message
• Right timing

Strategic Thinking
• Many No's for the right Yes!
• Anticipate what's coming
• Connect the dots

Team Development
• Build bench strength
• Identify hidden potential
• Make choices to up talent density

Master these foundations.
Use them to avoid learning lessons the hard way.

What skill helped you level up?
Share below ⬇️

♻️ Share to help fast-growing managers
🔔 Follow Dave Kline for more leadership frameworks

If you want to get promoted this year, read this:


Most people wait for the title to start leading.
They want permission and a promotion.

The top 1% know better.
They know most companies don’t like risk.

And the best way to make your promotion low risk?

Show them you can do the job...
BEFORE they give it to you.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about getting promoted:

Your company isn’t promoting potential.
Hope is not a qualification.

They’re promoting performance.
The performance they’ve already seen.

While most people focus on doing their job well,
Future leaders focus on something completely different:

JUDGMENT | Start Acting Like an Owner
• Own outcomes, not just tasks
• Make decisions as if the company’s success depends on you
• Solve problems before you’re asked

RELIABILITY | Make Your Manager’s Job Easier
• Anticipate needs before they ask
• Keep every commitment or escalate early
• Deliver work with recommendations, not just reports

LEADERSHIP | Develop People Around You
• Share knowledge freely
• Help new team members succeed faster
• Document your work so others can build on it

CREDIBILITY | Communicate with Clarity
• Write things down—documentation builds trust
• Follow up with clear next steps
• Use active listening to show you understand

PERSPECTIVE | Think Beyond Your Role
• Connect your work to bigger goals
• Offer ideas that benefit the whole team
• Ask questions about the larger business context

GROWTH | Give and Receive Feedback Well
• Give constructive input to peers
• Actively seek feedback on your own performance
• Handle criticism without getting defensive

SYSTEMS | Solve Problems at the Root
• Ask “why” until you find the real cause
• Address causes, not just symptoms
• Build solutions that prevent problems from coming back

IMPACT | Deliver Meaningful Results
• Focus on work that moves the needle
• Track and share your impact
• Make your value visible to decision-makers

AI | Stand Out with New Skills
• Learn and use AI tools to boost your productivity
• Automate routine work and teach others what you learn
• Become the go-to resource for new technology

The promotion paradox:
Companies promote based on performance, not potential.
But most people perform at their current level, not the next one.

The breakthrough insight:
Start doing the work before you get the job.
The title will follow the behavior, not the other way around.

What skill helped you get promoted recently?
Drop it in the comments if I missed one.

And before you go...

♻️ Share to help others earn their next promotion
🔖 Save this so you can check back on your progress
🔔 Follow Dave Kline for more leadership insights

Timeless Skills You must learn To Get Promoted This Year 

Most of what you do as a manager doesn’t matter.

These 5 levers will make or break you.

After 25 years of working with teams, 
The same pattern repeats:

Average managers try to do everything.
The great ones focus on what really matters.

These are the 5 factors every high-performing team gets right:

1. Clear Goal | Singular Focus
• If everything’s a priority, nothing is
• One mission everyone can recite from memory
• Make progress visible—post your key metrics publicly

2. Best People | Talent Density
• Filling seats with whoever’s available kills momentum
• Recruit constantly, raise the bar relentlessly
• Tap your top performers’ networks

3. Right Tools | Force Multipliers
• “We can’t afford good software” is an excuse
• Invest in systems that amplify talent
• Pre-approve any tool under $500/year

4. Least Friction | Ruthless Simplification
• “That’s how we’ve always done it” is a red flag
• Eliminate every unnecessary step and meeting
• Ask weekly: “What got in our way?”

5. Shortest Time | Speed as Strategy
• Waiting for perfect conditions means you’ll never act
• Run rapid experiments, learn fast
• Cut every cycle time in half—then do it again

The brutal truth:
Most teams have 3 out of 5 levers working.
Elite teams obsess over all 5, all the time.

One broken pillar pulls everyone down.

The diagnostic question:
Which lever is your bottleneck right now?

Fix that one first.
Everything else multiplies from there.

Want more practical frameworks like this?

Subscribe to the MGMT Playbook. 
My free weekly newsletter for leaders who want to level up.

https://mgmt.beehiiv.com

♻️ Share to help leaders focus on what matters
🔔 Follow Dave Kline for more practical leadership insights

The 8020 of Management

Follow me to learn how you can leverage AI to boost your productivity and accelerate your career. Scaled products to 8 Million+ users and built the world's biggest AI newsletter with 1 Million+ readers.

Zain Kahn

Before you spend $2,000 on an AI course, read this.

A lot of people are buying expensive AI courses right now.
But honestly, most of them don’t need to.

Some of the best AI learning resources in the world are already free.
And they’re not built by self-proclaimed AI experts online.They’re created by the companies actually building the models, chips, tools, and infrastructure behind this entire AI wave.

If you want to learn AI properly, it makes sense to learn directly from the source.

But before that, Check out 100+ such resources shared in this community of 200K+ AI/ML Engineers: https://lnkd.in/e64Jvdrt

Here's a list of 10 free AI learning platforms from industry leaders:
𝟭 - 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰:
https://lnkd.in/e5fK7QUA

𝟮 - 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲:
http://grow.google/ai

𝟯 - 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮:
https://lnkd.in/et6wz-ta

𝟰 - 𝗡𝗩𝗜𝗗𝗜𝗔:
https://lnkd.in/e8aHmFxc (GOATed)

𝟱 - 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁:
https://lnkd.in/ej85NeZc

𝟲 - 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜:
http://academy.openai.com

𝟳 - 𝗜𝗕𝗠:
http://skillsbuild.org

𝟴 - 𝗔𝗪𝗦:
http://skillbuilder.aws

𝟵 - 𝗗𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗔𝗜:
http://deeplearning.ai

𝟭𝟬 - 𝗛𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲:
https://lnkd.in/eajVCrvv

If you’re serious about learning AI, the biggest difference usually comes from consistency, not another course.

A simple system works surprisingly well:
• Pick one learning path
• Spend 30–45 minutes a day on it
• Build small projects as you go
• Share what you learn publicly
• Repeat for 90 days

That alone puts you ahead of most people who only consume content.
Paid courses aren’t always bad.
But too often people end up buying motivation instead of building real skills.

Follow me to learn how you can leverage AI to boost your productivity and accelerate your career. Scaled products to 10 Million+ users.

This guy from Cambridge plays with Claude Code like he owns it.

He talks about his workflow in 2026 and here's what's new: 

1. Video-Based Specification (Spec Phase)

> Screen Recording: 

Instead of writing a spec from scratch, find an existing product that is similar to your idea. Record your screen while using it and talking through your specific feature ideas and changes.

> Generate PRD: 

Upload this video to Gemini 1.5 Pro (referred to as Gemini 3 Pro/Free Pro in the video context) and ask it to generate a Product Requirement Document (PRD).

> Refine Spec: 

Use the "Ask User Question" tool in Claude Code. Prompt it to interview you about the generated spec to fill in missing details (e.g., "How should the emoji picker be positioned?").

> Package Discovery: 

Feed the refined spec into ChatGPT with "Heavy Thinking" (likely OpenAI's o1/o3 models) to search for and recommend specific, well-maintained GitHub packages (e.g., for a WYSIWYG editor) to avoid building complex components from scratch.

2. The Orchestrator Role

> Design Feedback Loops: 

Your primary job is not to write code but to design loops where the agent can build, fail, and learn.

> Monitor & Update: 

Watch the agent’s reasoning. If it makes a mistake, don't just fix the code—update the claude. md (project instructions file) to prevent that specific mistake from happening again.

> High-Level Decisions: 

Make the architectural decisions the agent can't, such as choosing the database or specific tools.

3. Model Choice & Tools

> Model Selection: 

Use Opus 4.5 for building large-scale features and GPT-5.2 for architecture and debugging (specific future models mentioned in his 2026 context).

> Voice Dictation: 

Use HyperWhisper to dictate prompts significantly faster than typing.

4. Execution & "Parallel Vibe Coding"

> Parallel Agents: 

For small, well-defined tasks (like extracting hard-coded strings for translations), spin up multiple sub-agents to work on different parts of the project simultaneously.

> Avoid Conflicts: 

Do not use parallel agents for large features within the same project to avoid complex merge conflicts ("meshing issues").

> Sub-agents for Multi-Project Fixes: 

If a bug exists in a template used by multiple projects, spin up one sub-agent per project to fix them all in parallel.

5. Review & Maintenance

> Planning Mode: 

Use Claude Code’s "Planning Mode" to prevent Architectural Drift, ensuring the agent sticks to the original design vision over time.

> Shape of Diffs: 

Inspect the "shape" of the code changes (diffs) to ensure they are manageable and align with expectations before accepting them.

> Forking for Learning: 

If the agent does something surprising or complex, fork the session. In the forked session, ask "Why did you do that?" or request diagrams to understand the code without polluting the context of the main working session.

Get more tutorials here: https://lnkd.in/e64Jvdrt

Traditional computer science degrees can't keep up with this pace.

Here are the 15 engineering blogs that actually teach real-world scale:

1 → THE CODE
Scale at global level.
Teaches you how to code with AI and AI Agents
https://lnkd.in/e64Jvdrt

2 → Airbnb Tech Blog
Product engineering done right.
User focused systems.
https://airbnb.tech/blog/

3 → Meta Engineering
Billions of users infrastructure.
Performance at extreme scale.
https://engineering.fb.com

4 → AWS Architecture
Cloud design patterns revealed.
Production ready blueprints.
https://lnkd.in/gqjh88PS

5 → Netflix TechBlog
Streaming at massive scale.
Chaos engineering explained.
https://lnkd.in/gNE8Cs6Z

6 → Discord Engineering
Real time systems mastery.
Handling millions of connections.
https://lnkd.in/gea6kSwt

7 → Google Research
Cutting edge tech breakthroughs.
Tomorrow's solutions today.
https://lnkd.in/gjzDu8wp

8 → NVIDIA Developer
GPU powered computing insights.
AI infrastructure secrets.
https://lnkd.in/dt_BW7qF

9 → Slack Engineering
Collaboration platform internals.
Distributed systems at scale.
https://slack.engineering

10 → Cloudflare Blog
Internet infrastructure deep dives.
Security and performance wins.
https://lnkd.in/gqa-HE6h

11 → Figma Tech Blog
Collaborative design systems.
Browser performance magic.
https://lnkd.in/g2KF_eX9

12 → Shopify Engineering
E-commerce at scale.
Black Friday traffic handled.
https://lnkd.in/g7DVzRAc

13 → Stripe Engineering
Payment systems that work.
Financial infrastructure explained.
https://lnkd.in/gfMr-jEr

14 → Microsoft Engineering
Enterprise scale solutions.
Developer tools insights.
https://lnkd.in/g3Mi8XES

15 → GitHub Engineering
Code collaboration at scale.
Developer platform secrets.
https://lnkd.in/gPHaD6AC

16 → Bonus
System design deep dives.
https://lnkd.in/g-tP7eEc

Save this for later.
Repost ♻️ for aspiring engineers.

Follow me for more AI playbooks and engineering resources.

Claude Code is only as good as your orchestration workflow.

I spent 6 months testing it so you don't have to. 

[ P.S. You can get my Ultimate Claude Code guide for engineers here at no cost: https://lnkd.in/e64Jvdrt ]

So Boris Cherny (the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic) recently shared the internal best practices his team actually uses daily. 

Someone brilliantly distilled those threads into a structured CLAUDE .md file you can drop straight into any project root.

It acts as a system prompt. Turns Claude into a far more autonomous, rigorous engineering partner.

Here's what it does:

→ 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗢𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Mandates "Plan Node Default" for any task over 3 steps. Uses subagents liberally to keep the main context window clean.

→ 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗽: This is the real magic. After ANY correction, it updates a tasks/lessons .md file. You're building a compounding system where the mistake rate drops over time because it actively learns from your feedback.

→ 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲: Can't mark a task complete without proving it works. Diffs behavior. Runs tests. Checks logs. The bar? "Would a staff engineer approve this?"

→ 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗕𝘂𝗴 𝗙𝗶𝘅𝗶𝗻𝗴: Zero hand-holding. Point it at failing CI tests or error logs... it just goes to work. No constant context switching from you.

→ 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: Forces a "Plan First" approach written to a todo .md with checkable items before any implementation starts.

And perhaps the most important part?

It forces the AI to prioritize simplicity, find root causes instead of temporary fixes, and minimize the blast radius of every change. Senior developer standards. Not shortcuts.

If you're spending hours a day in the terminal with AI, setting up a strong .md instruction file like this isn't optional anymore. It's the difference between AI that drifts and AI that compounds.

It takes time to set up. But if you do, you're ahead of almost everyone else.

Lemon is the most powerful tool I've used since ChatGPT.

You literally say things with your voice and it does it for you instantly.

Pure magic.

taplio

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