Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

Ego resilience affords you the ability to separate yourself from others a bit and to take responsibility.

a healthy ego can also help you separate what’s yours from what belongs to other people.

switchtracking, which is when someone gives you feedback (possibly critical) and you put something else back on them.

So much of a person and their sense of self-worth and being can be challenged in a feedback process.

write down explicitly what happened, not your feelings about what happened.

It’s completely okay to say that you’re not looking for feedback on your character.

To have a good meeting, there is order among the core attendees.

But you should be aligning at the beginning and end of the meeting to make sure that nothing major is missing, and everyone is on the same page.

The point of the agenda, and the meeting, is to collaborate on something.

Part of the purpose of the meeting is the discussion itself.

Companies at a certain scale start to have issues functioning if there is no clear understanding of ownership.

helps to find the alignment there, so ideas can be fleshed out without being attached to a particular person’s identity.

It’s the job of a manager to disambiguate healthy conflict from attack, so that respectful discourse is encouraged.

Then we stated the shared goal from both parties, as well as risks and constraints that may play a part in some of the conflicts that need to be ironed out.

That is the person who is going to own the outcome.

If you review the times in your life where you truly leveled up or learned a lot, some conflict was probably involved.