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August 7 - September 4, 2022
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help their new reports create a 30/60/90-day plan.
Communicate Your Style and Expectations
specifics like how often you want to meet with him, how the two of you will share information, and when and how often you’ll want to review his work.
get as much feedback as you can about the new hire’s perspective on the team in that first 90 days.
The downside, of course, is that sometimes you wonder why you needed to do this in a synchronous manner. Often the list is somewhat artificial and made up of things that could have been handled via chat or email.
I want the meeting to be driven by them, and I want to give them space to bring up whatever they feel is important.
problems in the workplace need to be
Establish Standards for Code and Systems
Positive feedback also makes your reports more likely to listen to you when you need to give them critical feedback. When they believe that their manager sees the good things they do, they’ll be more open to hearing about the areas where they might improve.
If you can’t use a concrete example to support a point, ask yourself if the point is something you should be communicating in the review. Forcing yourself to be specific will steer you away from writing reviews based on underlying bias.
Spend plenty of time on accomplishments and strengths
Real potential shows itself quickly. It shows itself as working hard to go the extra mile, offering insightful suggestions on problems, and helping the team in areas that were previously neglected.
system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).
First, you should be playing cheerleader. Support the team however they need supporting, especially by helping out with the work yourself. Order dinner. Tell them you appreciate the hard work. Make it clear that they’ll have explicit break time after the push. Make it as fun as you can in the moment. Sometimes a crunch period can serve as a bonding experience for a team. But they’ll remember whether their manager was with them during the stressful period, or off somewhere else, doing her own thing.
You can make the situation worse by undermining your peers in front of your team, so even when you are frustrated with them, try to stay positive and supportive of their efforts in public.
Review the Outcome of Your Decisions and Projects
the regular process retrospective has a lot of value for detecting patterns and forcing a reckoning with the outcome of decisions. Is the team feeling good about how they get requirements? Do they feel good about the code quality? This process helps you learn how the decisions you make over time affect the way your team operates in the day-to-day.
conflict-avoidant managers tend to favor harmony above functional working relationships. Creating a safe environment for disagreement to work itself out is far better than pretending that all disagreement does not exist.
Don’t rely exclusively on consensus or voting.
Don’t take it out on other teams.
Your goal as a manager, however, should not be to be nice, it should be to be kind.
It’s kind to tell someone who isn’t ready for promotion that she isn’t ready, and back that up with the work she needs to do to get there.
Be thoughtful about your behavior, and it’s unlikely that you’ll seek out unnecessary conflict.
The work of gelling a team begins by creating the friendliness that leads to psychological safety.
cut scope at the end of the project. That means that you, as the engineering team lead, will partner with your tech lead and the product lead/business representative to figure out what “must-haves” are not actually must-haves.
Healthy meetings require involvement from all parties, and a culture that favors short but productive meetings requires that participants do some up-front work
As a manager of multiple teams, you can win back a lot of time by pushing an efficient meetings culture down to your teams.
“Yes, and”
appealing to time and budget. Lay out the current workload in plain terms, and show how there is little room to maneuver.
key indicators of a team that knows what to do, has the tools to do it, and has the time to do it every day.
You have to be the advocate and push for technical process improvements that can lead to increased engineer productivity,
neither incident frequency nor incident prevention turns into a job that takes developers away from writing code
purpose-based binding
Purpose-driven teams are more open to new ideas and value changes that can help them serve their purpose better. They care less about the source of an idea than its merit in achieving their goals. The members of these teams are interested in learning from others outside their function, and they actively seek out chances to collaborate more broadly to create the best results.
first-team focus helps them make decisions that consider the needs of the company as a whole before focusing on the needs of their team.
people will look to you for behavioral guidance. What you want to teach them is how to focus.
figuring out what’s important, and going home.
any time you see something being done that feels inefficient, question it: Why does this feel inefficient to me? What is the value in the thing we are doing? Can we deliver that value faster? Can we strip down this project into something simpler and get it done more quickly?
“faster” is not about “the same number of hours but fewer total days.” “Faster” is about “the same value to the company in less total time.”
constantly ask yourself the same questions you ask your team: Can I do this faster? Do I need to be doing this at all? What value am I providing with this work?
We focus so we can go home, and we encourage going home because it forces us to constantly focus.
provide prompts about potential topics, and remind the person that the meeting is largely for his or her benefit. Each person should come prepared to focus on what he or she is interested in talking to you about.
What do you like best/worst about the project you are working on?
How
Are there any areas of the business strategy you don’t understand?
needs to be on top of the team’s performance and delivery, guiding them to focus on their goals and deliver results.
Think about what your culture values, and help your managers embody those values
Remember that you’re not expected to know everything just because you’re a manager. Use this to your advantage. Ask the person to teach you about the work she does. Sit down with her and treat her as if she were your mentor,
Make it clear to the person that your goal is to understand what she does so that you’re capable of appreciating it better.
