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May 3 - August 3, 2022
I set the first impression with a beautiful welcome letter on their desk. Every time a new engineer joined, I customized their welcome letter, printed it out on high-quality cardstock, and signed it with a pen, “Welcome! ~Medium Engineering.” The letter expressed the team’s enthusiasm at their joining, followed by a beautifully formatted schedule of their first day. I included the name of their onboarding buddy (see the next tip) as well as a pointer to a guide to set up their dev environments to work on in between meetings.
What’s a time when you felt really excited and motivated on a new project and team? What about it was most motivating? What does being supported at work look like for you?
as managers, we’re uniquely positioned to shape the stories that people tell. Our roles usually ensure that we get face time with a large cross-section of an organization. Use that time to share the evidence that speaks to the breadth of what your team is engaging with. Don’t stop there. Connect the dots and draw your audience to the stories that you want them to be telling.
When negative stories spread, they give you an opportunity to connect with your audience. Oftentimes, all you need to do is ask. Someone who is telling others that they’re frustrated with your team would likely welcome the opportunity to tell you why they’re frustrated.
They might be thinking about previous changes they believe are similar — because these didn’t work, they worry your idea won’t either.
So how can we persuade these irrational, emotion-filled humans around us? Help them to care about the idea you are presenting. Rather than a collection of bullet points, present information in an inspirational story that allows your listener to feel the problem and the proposed solution. Even better, encourage them to write the story — to spark their imagination and feel the possibilities. Change happens one person at a time, so make an effort to understand individual needs and concerns. Then, rather than focusing only on how the change will help the organization, build some individual
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A line manager who is interested in their team members’ well-being, checks in frequently, monitors morale, and so on, stands a far better chance of spotting the warning signs of a flight risk, and can therefore choose to address problems early. An opportunity to learn a new skill, a change of project, a tweak to working hours — there’s a million things that could make a world of difference to someone struggling to find the joy in their day-to-day routine.
It’s your responsibility as a leader to create space for life to happen and expect that there might always be something going on in your organization.
Inability to follow through: Try some lightweight goal setting, training, mentorship, rescoping of work
Lack of motivation or when problems have become stale: If possible, add variety to your report’s responsibilities,
Keep track of on-call rotations, incidents, number of alerts firing, and prioritize their remediations. Fixing the root cause of operational exhaustion is paramount.
When a working relationship turns adversarial, it is very rare that things will get better, no matter how much you try.
Reach out to your HR person and ask for guidance. Hone in your conflict navigation skills. Attend workshops for having difficult conversations, providing effective feedback, etc. Prepare for your one-on-ones; you might even want to have the main points written down to make sure you phrase things well. Consider having one-on-ones mediated by someone from HR if things are really bad.
Don’t answer emails at 2 a.m. or come in over the weekend, and definitely don’t be the first one in and last one out every single day.
take a walk after lunch, play some sport or maybe go to the gym. Small changes make a huge difference.
One key part of this is having regular one-on-ones with your manager. Regular one-on-ones should allow you to talk openly and honestly about the issues affecting you and (much more important!) how they are affecting you. This is easier said than done, and you’ll need a high degree of psychological safety to do this. Building this degree of trust and openness with your manager will make it much easier for you to do the same thing with your team.
If going to the gym works for your body, mindfulness does the same for your brain. How do you train mindfulness? One simple exercise you can try is just to take five minutes out each day to focus on your breathing.
anything that you do at work that your management chain wants done or just sees as valuable will gain you political capital.
There’s usually something you can quickly and easily do that benefits your company but is someone else’s job that would take them much, much longer to perform (if they can even do it at all). If you keep your eyes open for the chance to do these
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
We immediately start building relationships with our direct reports, managing career development, removing blockers, providing context, helping set goals and resolving conflicts. We begin spending time in one-on-ones on a recurrent basis to get to know them, understand their drivers, and help them to grow and achieve their goals.
Establish how you want to work together. Communicate clearly what you are responsible for, and identify the areas that may overlap. Define how you want to make cross-group decisions and establish the individual and collective goals.
Constantly changing priorities and surprise projects erode team morale and leave everyone unsure of whether they’re working on the most important thing, or whether they’ll ever get to finish anything. Even though being adaptable and flexible is critical for most teams, it’s always important to have some kind of roadmap and approach to prioritization and planning work.
As a manager, it’s helpful for you to dig into why they’re excited so that you can transmit it to your team. Understanding where the feedback came from and how they intend to make your users’ lives better will also help you to make sure the implementation delivers the impact the PM is excited about.
What a feature will cost and how much revenue potential it has are the basis for forecasting the return
Time has an added wrinkle because it’s not fungible, so getting something shipped before a deadline can hold significant value.
ask what’s driving a deadline so that you can align your team’s schedule with the product’s.
To understand how the PM is thinking about impact, open a conversation about the metrics that a PM is watching and the key use cases they hope your product will serve.
Micromanagement. Agile is not a fit for command-and-control environments.
when asked to describe that “best team,” they’ll come up with characteristics like “respect” and “trust” and “shared purpose” and “we had each other’s backs.”
Servant leadership means we managers are not the directors but the facilitators and enablers. We’re looking to create cultures in which teamwork and psychological safety and autonomy thrive — in which everyone in our organizations, right down to the interns, are leaders, each one of us leading from our unique expertise and experience.
Let’s look at one way in which entities in Kubernetes might map to organizational constructs: Cluster: organization Container: person Pod: team Node: department Scheduler: vice president Controller Manager: department head Controller: manager Kubelet: program/product/project manager Image Registry: the pipeline
if a team is acting in a way that you don’t understand, there’s probably something making them feel unsafe.
Every great engineer turned manager discovers they’ve donned a set of bulky but powerful gloves. These gloves allow them to move much bigger rocks than before but hinder their ability to tinker with the fine details. They will struggle wearing these new gloves because until now they enjoyed and excelled at dealing with fine details.
be a zero. Listen and understand before you try to change something.
There’s a limit to how much any one person can do: trying to put more water into a full bucket isn’t going to net you any more water than you already had.
one-on-ones: Schedule for at least 30 minutes every week or fortnight. Don’t have anything immediately after, leave time for it to expand if needed. Don’t have more than two or three in any one day;
Don’t use it as status update, focus on wider questions.
You shouldn’t be doing most of the talking. Keep it free form, but have some basic questions and points that you bring up.
most important lessons to learn as a new manager is that you can’t do it all,
when making decisions, we need to do a better job of engaging as many stakeholders as we can, ideally getting their alignment, but at minimum communicating what we are doing and why.
All else being equal, a team with stable membership will perform better over time.
In an Agile shop, the product owner constructs work items with the capabilities and past performance of the team in mind. Their knowledge of the team can have a profound impact on how the product owner writes the work items, and where they place them in the backlog. As the product owner’s knowledge of the team grows, their ability to write consistently sized work items that the team can easily estimate and execute becomes better and better. Their performance becomes stable, which means it’s predictable.
the more a team changes, the less likely it is that its members will trust one another,
you might have a roaming “firefighter” team whose role is to acquire knowledge across products and supplement teams under pressure by pulling tickets from their backlog that are relatively independent of the rest of pressured-team’s work. This kind of approach works particularly well when the department has well-documented definitions of done
The problem is, though, that how high an individual’s IQ is or how smart they are has nothing to do with on-the-job performance.
What have you learned in the past six months?
Tell me about a time when you failed and what you learned from that?
Do you have the skills, expertise, and experience to perform the job?
For development, we are asking for technical questions related to that environment: object-oriented design, design patterns, code review, DevOps, different type of testings, security, scaling, Agile. And so on. We ask the candidate for real-life experience, and at the same time we are probing their presentation and communication skills.
