I recorded this talk for the previous round of LeadDev Together. You can access it here (requires signup).
All the penguin imagery in this talk are photos my mom took in Antarctica.
Tag: leaddev
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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, everyone else: hell no).
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Coachability: the overlooked factor in people development
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: those with whom it’s easy to accelerate and have a real and lasting impact on, and those where the lasting impact is the relief we feel once we no longer work with them.
Often, the difference between the people who accelerate and those that don’t is their coachability. However, a person’s coachability is not immutable. As individuals, we can work on trying to be more coachable, and as managers, we can try and work to understand how to build a relationship of coachability and work with our teammates to not just support their growth, but support their ability to grow.
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Empowering your engineering team with an effective decision-making process
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 scale because it pushes all the work onto the team, creating variance and evading responsibility. Managers in this category will be fine as long as they have high-performing individuals making good decisions, but they won’t know where to begin with people who can’t make good decisions, or how to address issues when things go wrong.