The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

A short apology that takes responsibility for your role in creating a negative situation or hurting another person is all that is necessary. If you go too long, it often turns into an excuse or a distraction.

Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

Pretending to lack structure tends to create hidden power structures resulting from the nature of human communication and the challenges of trying to scale that communication.

When work is done to satisfy an immediate task, in a unified code base worked on by a team of interchangeables, the result is not usually a larger thoughtful structure, but a tweak here, a hack there — anything to get things done and moving forward.

Learning rarely comes for free. Analyzing situations and thinking about good takeaways takes time.

Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it. Frederick Laloux,

Not every person will fit in at every company.

You need this wiggle room to retain talent who are performing well at their current levels but are not ready to take on the additional responsibility of the next level.

Code review is largely a socialization exercise, so that multiple team members have seen and are aware of the changed code.

Great managers are masters of working through conflict. Getting good at working through conflict means getting good at taking your ego out of the conversation.

Look for the other side of the story. Think about the other perspectives at play. Investigate your emotional reactions, and observe when those reactions make it hard to see clearly what’s going on around you, what needs to be said.