I was on a panel recently – well, we ran it like a meeting, which was fun – about remote meetings and making them suck less. It was fun and I got some nice ideas from my fellow panelists! Watch it here.
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Category: management
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The culture of process
My latest in LeadDev… One of the challenges we face as engineering managers is how people react to process differently. Sometimes it’s like we’re talking about entirely different things – we propose something we expect to be lightweight, and people react like we’re instituting TPS reports or time-tracking in six minute intervals (normal for lawyers, […]
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The Being and Doing Brainstorm
A tool in balance coaching is the being and doing brainstorm. You brainstorm in two lists: How am I being? What am I doing? The combination of the two feeds each other. E.g. you might say I’m “being proactive”, and then in doing you could list some ways to be proactive (e.g. “make a todo […]
I have been working for distributed companies for over 5 years – long before this pandemic malarkey and everyone becoming a “remote work expert”. The reality of the past 18 months for many people has been a lot of terrible remote work. Including for me at times – I love remote work in “normal times”, […]
My latest in LeadDev… How do your reports respond to feedback? As managers, it’s our job to grow the people we work with. This is how we build a bench, and scale ourselves and the organization. Of course, this is easy to say and hard to do, and we’ve all encountered a spectrum of people: […]
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The Return of the Office
There has been Much Discourse over the past few days on forcing people to return to offices, and judgement of those who may not want to. Has Remote Work… Worked? I always wonder what’s on the other side of these edicts about returning to the office. How do the people writing them think the last […]
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Pandemic Problems
For the past couple of months, I’ve kept a post it on my desk. It says: How are people doing? – Downtime– Social isolation– Perspective You can probably guess what it’s for – it’s a reminder of the core struggles I’ve been noticing from people. Downtime: downtime is lower quality, and people struggle to recharge. […]
I recorded a podcast based on my Living By the Code interview, and got spicy talking about inclusion, equity, and sponsorship. We also talked about Glowforge, books I love, and what new managers need. [iTunes] [Spotify]
My latest for LeadDev… A common area where managers fail to scale is in decision-making. The two extremes are: being responsible means making all decisions and enabling a team means staying out of details and letting them make decisions. Both of these are bad. One is controlling and fails to scale for obvious reasons. The other fails to […]
Following on from our recent video, my friend Jean and I did a little AMA on the same topic – coaching. You can read the write up here.