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November 19, 2023 - March 17, 2024
Expect the type of feedback to change somewhat from personal feedback to team- or strategy-related input.
When you are interested in being promoted, it’s very important to ask your manager for specific areas to focus on in order to get that promotion.
cannot guarantee promotions, but good managers know what the system is looking for and can help you build those achievements and skills. Again, this only goes so far. At more senior levels of work, opportunities for promotion are much more rare, and your manager may need you to find and propose the achievements that qualify you for the next level.
become a CTO myself. What should I be doing now to make that possible?
just learning new technologies: great CTOs have strong communication skills, project management skills, and product sense, in addition to good technical sense.
When you are persistently unhappy, say something. When you are stuck, ask for help. When you want a raise, ask for it. When you want a promotion, find out what you need to do to get it.
Plenty of great engineers make ineffective managers because they don’t know or want to deal with the politics of leadership in their companies.
Well, that gives you an opportunity to work on another management skill: communicating what needs to happen. If you expect him to do research on his own before asking you a question, tell him so!
If all else fails, give him the first milestone of the project and tell him to work on it alone for a day or two.
The alpha geek usually can’t deal with dissent,
The alpha geek tries to create a culture of excellence, but ends up creating a culture of fear.
and many engineers respect that intelligence enough to put up with the downsides.
Alpha geeks get very threatened when people complain about systems they built or criticize their past technical decisions.
Alpha geeks who believe that their value comes from knowing more than others can also hide information in order to maintain their edge, which makes everyone on the team less effective.
Conversely, an impatient young engineer may find a degree of humility when tasked with helping an intern succeed (under your supervision).
When we close our minds and stop learning, we start to lose the most valuable skill for maintaining and growing a successful technical career. Technology
However, tech leads will be working on one major new technical skill: project management.
focus is more on my team. How do I empower them? How do I remove the obstacles slowing them down?
You also know that it’s important to get your team into a schedule that allows them to be focused on development for long stretches of time, because they will need to focus for several days on coding problems.
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.
The plan itself, however accurate it turns out, is less important than spending time on the act of planning.
I never hesitate nowadays to take the opportunity to explain basics and motivation to senior or junior members. It educates them without making them feel small, they learn to trust my judgment and advice, and we bring about change. Taking the time to explain is very important.
Run the project and adjust the plan as you go. The value of a good planning process is that it helps you know approximately how far the project has come, and approximately how far it is from completion. As things slip (and they always do), keep everyone apprised of the status. But now, instead of guessing how far you have to go, you can clearly point to the milestones that have been hit and outline the expected remaining work. Use the insights gained in the planning process to manage requirements changes. You learned a lot by breaking down the project given the original set of requirements. If
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make a rollback plan.
She seeks out your feedback on technical matters, but sometimes forgets to tell you about new initiatives until it’s too late for you to put in your two cents.
they have their own ideas for what technical tasks should be prioritized.
his coaching skills leave a lot to be desired. Maybe he is just worried that you will outshine him?
The politics of figuring out how to lead without undermining your peers or your boss are trickier than you expected.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
It’s a waste of your time to play rules cop, and automation can often make the rules more obvious.
As the manager of a process czar, help that person get more comfortable with ambiguity.
Determine which decisions must be made by you,
If one universal talent separates successful leaders from the pack, it’s communication skills.
How do you like to be praised, in public or in private?
Are there any manager behaviors that you know you hate? If you asked me this question, my answer would be: skipping or rescheduling 1-1s, neglecting to give me feedback, and avoiding difficult conversations.
How much does this person push information up to you?
Don’t make the fatal error of spending all your time with your problem employees and ignoring your stars.
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.
You don’t have to have a to-do list, but problems in the workplace need to be either dealt with or put aside by mutual agreement. There is very little value to repeatedly focusing on drama.
you’re already working closely with is a waste of time because all you’re
with questions for you to answer about the team,
One final piece of advice: try to keep notes in a shared document, with you the manager playing note taker.
Good Manager, Bad Manager: Micromanager, Delegator
The hardest thing about micromanagement is that there are times when you need to do it.
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.
The worst micromanagers are those who constantly ask for information they could easily get themselves.
Hiding important information intentionally is a failure, and getting stuck on a problem or making a mistake is often just an opportunity for learning.
For you, as a new manager, getting into the habit of continuous feedback is training you to pay attention to individuals, which in turn makes it easier to recognize and foster talent.
anything, I think the best outcome of attempting a continuous feedback cycle is not necessarily the actual feedback generated, but rather that the effort forces you to start paying attention to the individuals on your team.
