More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 11, 2020 - March 12, 2021
Keeping your 1-1s regular through times of uncertainty will help stabilize your team and slow down the rumor mill.
The downfall of the rambling 1-1 is that, if it’s left unchecked, it can turn into a complaining session or therapy. Empathetic leaders can sometimes allow themselves to get sucked into an unhealthy closeness with their direct reports.
commiserating,
There is very little value to repeatedly focusing on drama.
The hardest thing about micromanagement is that there are times when you need to do it.
Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, is an important element of motivation.
This is why micromanagers find it so difficult to retain great teams. When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly.
delegation is not the same thing as abdication.
Developing basic standards as a team helps everyone communicate with one another in code and design reviews, and it depersonalizes the process of providing technical feedback.
Continuous feedback is, more than anything, a commitment to regularly sharing both positive and corrective feedback.
Adopting a habit of positive recognition forces you to be on the lookout for things to praise, which in turn causes you to pay attention to what individuals are bringing to various projects.
Performance reviews go wrong because people aren’t given time to prioritize working on them, and many people find them hard to write.
we tend to review people through the lens of those biases, criticizing some people for behaviors that we don’t even notice in others.
The goal for viewing the whole year is to recognize not just early accomplishments but also the growth and change you’ve seen since then.
What about the case where you have very little meaningful feedback for improvement? This indicates that the person is ready to be promoted or given more challenging work. If the person is doing a solid job at her level but isn’t ready for promotion, the feedback should indicate one or two skills she needs to expand to become qualified for promotion.
I usually give people a printed copy of the review as they’re leaving on the evening before the review is scheduled. This practice gives them a chance to read it at home, and then come to the meeting ready to talk about what it says.
Both of these promotions were successful, but I have no doubt that we succeeded at least partially because my boss/mentor knew exactly how to play the game.
If you’re a manager, you are going to play a key role in getting people on your team promoted.
The important thing for you to start doing now that you’re in management is to learn how the game is played at your company.
As you learn how to play the game, I encourage you to be fairly transparent with your team. When members express the desire to be promoted and they don’t have a strong case for promotion, telling them what goes into the process will help them understand what they may need to change.
If there is no growth potential on your team because there’s no room for people to work at a more senior level, it may be a sign that you need to rethink the way work is done in order to let individuals take on bigger responsibilities.
Depending on the company, such a plan might actually be an effort to turn an employee around, but often the plan is written in such a way that the person can’t possibly hope to achieve the goals in the allotted time, and it’s just a generous way of giving someone time to look for another job before being fired.
One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones.
Additionally, they identify areas of strategic technical debt, do the cost/benefit analysis for resolving this debt, and communicate suggested timelines for prioritizing this to the management team.
The theme of this chapter is a focus on the job beyond the people management. Because it’s easy for new managers to get overly focused on the people-related tasks,
Humans, by and large, feel good when they set small goals and meet them regularly.
I pushed the team to make improvements that allowed us to release daily. The impact of this change on the team was immediate. It turns out that releases can be a point of resource contention. When people are contending for a scarce resource, conflicts and unhappiness among team members are almost inevitable.
In a case where overwork is due to a pressing, time-critical release, remember two things. 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.
Yeah, no, never. No one should ever have to work overtime.
encouraging some PG-rated humor in chat rooms, and asking people how their lives are going are all ways to cultivate team unity.
Do set up clear processes to depersonalize decisions.
When you want to allow for group decision making, the group needs to have a clear set of standards that they use to evaluate decisions. Start with a shared understanding of the goals, risks, and the questions to answer before making a decision. When you assign the ownership for making a decision to someone on the team, make it clear which members of the team should be consulted for feedback and who needs to be informed of the decision or plan.
The best way to avoid brilliant jerk syndrome is to simply not hire one. Once they’re hired, getting rid of brilliant jerks takes a level of management confidence that I think is uncommon. Fortunately, these folks will often get rid of themselves, because even though you may not have the guts to fire them, it’s unlikely that you’ll be stupid enough to promote them. Right? Let’s hope so.
Simply put, if your team member doesn’t respect you or her peers, why is she working there? Ask her if she wants to be working on your team. If she says she does, lay out what you expect, clearly and calmly. If she says she doesn’t, start the process to move her to another team, or help her leave the company.
The popular doubling rule of software estimation is, “Whenever asked for an estimate, take your guess and double it.” This rule is appropriate and good to use when you’re asked for an off-the-cuff guess.
David Allen’s book Getting Things Done1 to be useful to think about, and I recommend reading it even if you don’t adopt the whole process.
Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency.
The popular management book First, Break All the Rules2 discusses several questions you can answer to help predict team productivity and satisfaction. Among them are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
Laziness and impatience. We focus so we can go home, and we encourage going home because it forces us to constantly focus. This is how great teams scale.
Let’s start with 1-1s. As we’ve discussed, 1-1s are an essential tool for a manager to determine the health of her team and gather and impart valuable information. Any manager you hire should role-play a few 1-1s as part of the interview process. One of the best ways to do this is by asking the people who would report to the new manager to interview her by asking her to help with problems they have right now, or have had in the recent past.
His observation is that most new hires act in self-interest until they get to know their colleagues, and then they move into group interest.
If you can screen for managers who naturally gravitate toward the cultural values that your company already possesses, they are more likely to make this shift quickly than managers who have very different personal beliefs.
the CTO is the technical leader at the company’s current stage of evolution. To me, that definition is rather unsatisfying, and misses the hardest part of the job. To expand, the CTO should be the strategic technical executive the company needs in its current stage of evolution.
You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it.
The final element of this first-team trust and respect is the cone of silence. Disagreements that happen in the context of the leadership team don’t exist to the wider team. Once a decision is made, we commit to that decision and put on a united front in front of our engineering teams and anyone else in the company. It’s easier said than done — I’ve struggled frequently with hiding my own disagreements with my peers.
You’re no longer one of the team. Your first team is comprised of your peers at the leadership/executive level, and your reporting structure has now become your second team.
If you try to maintain a “buddy” image, your reports are going to have a hard time distinguishing between their buddy thinking out loud and their boss asking them to focus on something.
It’s deeply tempting to rant to those people you consider friends in your reporting team about the challenges of your position, but this is a bad idea. As their leader, you can easily undermine their confidence by sharing worries that they can’t do anything to mitigate.
Unfortunately, when you’re the leader, the dynamic changes, and those who may have fought back when you were an individual contributor will feel threatened by you as a leader.
True North helps us understand that all these issues must be carefully considered when we put code into production. Just because these rules have exceptions doesn’t mean we forget that they exist.
As a CTO for a commerce company, I set True North for most fundamental technical decision making around production readiness, scaling, systems design, architecture, testing, and language choice. That doesn’t mean I made all of those decisions, but I guided the standards by which such decisions would be evaluated.
