Hello, I am David Thompson.

I spent 25 years in Information Technology management, mostly in Higher Education, and for most of that time I proudly told anyone who would listen that I was the worst manager ever.

I meant it as a compliment to myself.

You see, I was never trying to be a manager. It was offered to me early in my career and I accepted it, mostly because the salary increase was hard to argue with. I had no formal training, no real role model to follow, and honestly no idea what I was doing. What I did have was a very clear memory of every workplace experience I had ever been through, the layoffs, the indifferent bosses, the environments where you were useful until you weren’t, and a very strong feeling that there had to be a better way to treat people.

It turns out there was. I just needed someone to show it to me.

Early in my time at a local community college, a senior leader pulled me aside and told me they saw something in me. Emotional Intelligence, they called it. I smiled, said thank you, and immediately googled it when I got back to my desk. What followed was an invitation to participate in the college’s Leadership Academy, and honestly, it changed everything. For the first time in my career someone was drawing a clear and deliberate line between management and leadership, and I realized instantly which side of that line I wanted to be on.

Being a manager never sounded like fun to me. Being a leader? I couldn’t wait to get started.

Over the next 25 years I led software development teams, infrastructure teams, cloud architecture teams, and more. I hired people I believed in, fought for them when it mattered, and built environments where they felt safe enough to take risks, challenge ideas, and bring their best thinking to work every day. My teams were productive, creative, and genuinely committed to each other’s success. Former team members still call me for advice, which I find more validating than any performance review I ever received.

It was not always easy and it did not always go smoothly. I made mistakes, misjudged situations, and had more than a few uncomfortable conversations along the way. I was called into HR. I was demoted. I was told I was too easy, too friendly, too lenient. I watched a management culture I had spent years building get systematically dismantled around me. And eventually, after 25 years, I retired earlier than I had planned, under circumstances I am still processing.

But here is what I know for certain. The people who showed up to my retirement party were not there out of obligation. They were there because at some point during our time together, something had mattered. A conversation, a decision, a moment where I chose their dignity over my convenience. Those people are the proof of concept.

I built WhyPeopleFollow.com because I believe the conversation between management and leadership is one of the most important ones happening in any organization right now, and most people are having it wrong. Leadership is not a personality type or a management technique. It is a daily decision to put your ego aside, invest in the people around you, and trust that the returns will come. They always do, just not always on the timeline or in the form you expect.

I am not a consultant, a theorist, or a keynote speaker with a ten step framework. I am someone who spent 25 years in the room where it happens, making decisions in real time with real people and real consequences. Some of those decisions were good. Some were not. All of them taught me something.

This site is where I share all of it. The wins, the failures, the uncomfortable truths, and the philosophy I built one team at a time over a career I am genuinely proud of.

You can’t make someone follow you. But you can become someone worth following.

I hope something here helps you do exactly that.

David Thompson
Founder, WhyPeopleFollow.com