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April 17 - May 2, 2021
You do want to get this feedback, though, because the only thing worse than getting behavioral feedback is not getting it at all, or getting it only during your performance review.
Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.
Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work. The most mundane work can turn into a source of pride when you understand how it contributes to the overall success of the company.
It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else.
You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected.
You will not get everything you ask for, and asking is not usually a fun or comfortable experience. However, it’s the fastest way forward.
Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.
Plenty of great engineers make ineffective managers because they don’t know or want to deal with the politics of leadership in their companies.
Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people.
One of the early lessons in leadership, whether it is via direct management or indirect influence, is that people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand.
With that said, what if the intern does spend too much time asking you for help, without ever looking for help himself? Well, that gives you an opportunity to work on another management skill: communicating what needs to happen.
Mentoring new hires is critical.
Tell your mentee what you expect from him.
There’s no point in being a mentor to a relative stranger if you can’t at least use that professional distance to offer him the kind of candid advice that he may not get from his manager or coworkers.
If you’re ever in the position to promote people to management, be very, very careful in giving your alpha geeks team management positions, and keep a close eye on the impact they have in that role.
As a manager you help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals.
Mentoring, when done well, starts to shape the skills every future leader needs.
The idea that the tech lead role should automatically be given to the most experienced engineer, the one who can handle the most complex features or who writes the best code, is a common misconception that even experienced managers fall for.
My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.
Having the technical chops and maturity is nothing, however, if you can’t figure out the biggest trick of being a good tech lead: the willingness to step away from the code and figure out how to balance your technical commitments with the work the whole team
The worst scheduling mistake is allowing yourself to get pulled randomly into meetings.
The Stone of Triumph is a metaphor for achieving recognition only to discover that recognition comes with a heavy price.
It almost killed me. And it was one of the most important learning experiences of my career.
As you move forward in your career, you need to understand how to break down work that has complexity beyond the scope of what you can do as an individual.
Ultimately, the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens.
have a strong opinion on pushing people into management roles, which is that you shouldn’t do it.
As a new tech lead, be careful of relying on process to solve problems that are a result of communication or leadership gaps on your team.
As with many of the manager pitfalls, an obsession with process can be related to a fear of failure and a desire to control things to prevent the unexpected.
If one universal talent separates successful leaders from the pack, it’s communication skills.
doesn’t matter whether you choose to dive deep into technology, or become a manager — if you can’t communicate and listen to what other people are saying, your career growth from this point on will suffer.
Your new hire needs to understand your expectations and your style just as much as you need to understand his. You’ll each need to adjust a little bit to meet the other, but if the new hire doesn’t know what you expect from him, he can’t deliver what he needs to deliver.
“Regular 1-1s are like going to a psychiatrist when you’re fine and discovering you have depression.”
Empathetic leaders can sometimes allow themselves to get sucked into an unhealthy closeness with their direct reports. If you start focusing a lot of energy on hearing reports’ complaints and commiserating, you’re quite possibly making the problem worse.
As much as possible, when someone does something that needs immediate corrective feedback (insulting a colleague, missing a critical meeting, using inappropriate language), don’t wait for the 1-1 to provide that feedback.
Micromanagement creeps up on you. A high-stress project that can’t be allowed to slip seems at risk, and so you step in to correct it. You delegate something, but then discover that you don’t like the technical choices the team has made to implement it, so you tell them to rewrite it.
The hardest thing about micromanagement is that there are times when you need to do it.
On the other hand, delegation is not the same thing as abdication. When you’re delegating responsibility, you’re still expected to be involved as much as is necessary to help the project succeed.
It’s important to remember that being a good leader means being good at delegating.
You have a million things on your plate, but plan to spend solid, uninterrupted time working on reviews. Work from home if you need to. You owe your team enough time to read the collected feedback, digest it, and summarize it well.
You want to celebrate achievements, talk about what’s going well, and give plenty of praise for good work.
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.
Some people may never need to be promoted out of their current level, but the nature of the tech industry is such that skills need to be refreshed to stay current, so you can also focus on new technical learning opportunities.
In my experience, people are uncomfortable being told they merely meet expectations, especially those who are early in their careers.
A person who has never shown reasonable performance, and who has been with a company long enough for you to observe performance, probably doesn’t actually have potential, at least within that company.
great firefighter who hates planning may be better suited to an operations-focused team.
Don’t confuse “potential” as it might be described by a grade-school teacher with the type of potential you care about. You are not molding young minds; you’re asking employees to do work and help you grow a company.
If you’re a manager, you are going to play a key role in getting people on your team promoted.
Generally, you’ll look at the people on your team a couple of times a year, consider their job level, and ask yourself, are any of these people close to the next level? In the case of the early-career staff, the answer is likely to be yes.
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.
One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones. You need to understand what a person is supposed to be giving you, and if that isn’t happening, make it clear to her early and often that she is not meeting expectations.
