Jason Yip:

Good relationships facilitate future support and creates advocates. Being able to get something done is not just about your individual capability but also about your influence with the stakeholders and teams that you depend on.

The art of naming what’s happening in the room to get things back on track.

Tara Seshan:

For years, communicating tradeoffs to senior leaders was one of my biggest challenges. While presenting the pros and cons between two priorities, I’d somehow always end up committing to doing both, and in less time than I had planned. As you’d expect, this usually went … badly. I’d burn myself out or, worse, burn out my team.

Charity Majors:

Success in business is what earns you the right to devote more time, attention, and resources to cultural issues, and to experiment with things that matter to you.

Phil Le-Brun:

Rather than pretending you can craft the perfect organisation chart and operating model, I advocate starting with principles and tenets to guide your organisation. The former method is an overly logical and static approach to human issues, as I described in my first post on untangling your organisational hairball. Principles have (I hope) shifted from outdated concepts, such as spans of control, in search of elusive efficiencies to those better suited for an era where complexity, speed, and innovation define organisations. Previous blog posts give in-depth examples of principles and decision-making tenets. But remember, the most beautifully crafted principles in the world mean nothing unless a comprehensive understanding of them cascades throughout the organisation.

Luca Dellanna:

Leaders who think organizational culture is a set of concepts attempt to change it using words and concepts – and inevitably fail, because organizational culture is not a set of concepts.

Simon Harris:

Participatory leadership is knowing when to lead, when to be led, and when to get out of the way. It’s connecting people, creating and holding the space for them, helping with jobs to be done, and allowing things to play out. It’s fostering a sense of ownership and accountability by actively involving and guiding others in problem-solving and decision-making. It’s recognising that no individual possesses all the necessary information or expertise, and that we don’t need to have all the knowledge and all the answers. It’s being comfortable being uncomfortable.

Farnam Street:

The key lesson here is that if we are to intervene, we need a solid idea of not only the benefits of our interventions but also the harm we may cause—the second and subsequent order consequences. Otherwise, how will we know when, despite our best intentions, we cause more harm than we do good?

Farnam Street:

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Christoffer Stjernlöf:

The perspectives needed for good engineering (And good management, for that matter):

1. Trust the people doing the work.
2. See the problem for yourself and accept reality.
3. Attend to the big picture.
4. (Work with interactions and trade-offs.)

Simon Harris:

Most people want to improve, know that improvement requires change, and want to take an active part in it. Engage with them early and often, be explicit about what is known, and what is still to be worked through, and help them understand for themselves how to use their own skills to drive the change you want to see.

Kristi Hedges:

Inspired people make inspired workers make inspired companies. Encourage workers to define passion in any way they want, and align your workplace to support a wide variety of situations.

Sean Byrnes:

In fact, as a leader, there are often only a handful of key decisions that make the difference between success and failure. The challenge is not whether you can be at your best all the time, the challenge is whether you are at your best when you make those key decisions. Since we never know when those decisions will happen, we have to find a way to be ready for them at all times.

Roger Martin:

The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.

Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman:

Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organizational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.

Rands:

Leaders sound like they know what they’re talking about because they’ve taken the time to understand the situation entirely. They read the room; they communicate clearly and consistently to their audience. Their context has been carefully constructed by asking penetrating questions from the humans who most understand the situation.

Zero Defects means the goal would be considered ‘failed’ if there were even a single defect, so even if the intention behind the goal was good, it puts great pressure on people to find other ways to achieve this impossible objective.

Farnam Street:

Sometimes doing nothing at all or removing inputs is the better approach.

Dina Denham Smith and Alicia A. Grandey:

Leaders are expected to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout (while also addressing their own), demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility and remote work — all while managing the bottom line, doing more with less, and overcoming challenges with hiring and retaining talent. They should appear authentic, but if they get too honest about their distress, others may lose confidence in their leadership, known as the “authenticity paradox.”

A post that looks at various aspects of being a senior leader.

I personally have a fondness for framing the role as building the machine that builds the machine and all that entails.

Sam McAfee:

Many organizations still focus the majority of their decision making on one person or one small group of people at the top. This concentration of decision making isn’t just inefficient, it’s degenerative. No organization that maintains such centralized control over decisions will be able to adapt at the speed required by today’s markets.

Dave Bailey provides a manager’s guide to holding their teams accountable.

Dave Kellog:

In the end, there are two types of things that CEOs can potentially stress about:

• Things they can control. They shouldn’t stress over these because they should do something about them, instead.
• Things they can’t control. They shouldn’t stress over these because doing so will not change the outcome. Worse yet, it may well change the outcome — for the worse — over the things they can control.

Ergo, CEOs should never stress about things. QED.

Jean-Michel Lemieux:

“I thought that was my job — to take away all this crap from you and let you do your CEO thing. I thought you wanted me to be autonomous. I need autonomy.”

Johanna Rothman:

When managers collaborate, they can collaborate on the entire management job. That job is to create an environment where everyone can do succeed, in service of a greater goal.

Kent Beck:

“Holding accountable” is code for blame, the attempt to avoid or deflect consequences. Blame is a weak premise from which to work. Blame requires that you spend time and energy protecting yourself. In an environment of blame it is not safe to say what you do and don’t know. Blame leaves everyone worried about who is out to get them. All the energy they spend hiding could be spent interacting and adding value to the project. Work gets done much less efficiently.

Practical experience of using Ray Dalio’s believability metric.

Bill Parcells:

The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team.

When you’re shaping an org in practice, the work you’re doing usually decomposes to manipulating three levers: structure, incentives, and culture (or, as Andy Grove puts it ‘contractual obligations, economic incentives, and culture’). A good org designer knows that they must pay attention to the interplay between all three elements.

Lara Hogan:

So, when a fraught issue arises, how can we help our organization move forward in a way that actually builds rather than breaks trust? Over time, and after many communication mistakes, I honed a four-part template, covering the following

Bungay Stanier explains how advice-giving goes bad; the three personas of your Advice Monster; and the powerful act of staying curious a little longer.

Timothy R. Clark:

Low-velocity decision making. In a nice culture, there’s pressure to go along to get along. A low tolerance for candor makes the necessary discussion and analysis for decision making shallow and slow. You either get an echo chamber in which the homogenization of thought gives you a flawed decision, or you conduct what seem to be endless rounds of discussion in pursuit of consensus. Eventually, this can lead to chronic indecisiveness.

Denise Yu:

In every conversation you’re part of, create clarity and reduce chaos.

With more advice on how to do that in the linked thread.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started.

Pat Kua:

Makers receive constant praise for solving problems, and take pleasure in being the expert. Leaders in Maker mode go out of their way to show they have the right answer. They need to have the first and last say. They over invest in their own solutions and don’t create space for others to contribute.

Will Larson:

Stories focus on the why, sharing the experience and context around the decision and results.

Stories also eliminate most of the least productive follow-up conversations after giving advice, where the advice-requester then argues against the advice. Stories relieve the advice-giver from the obligation to defend their advice. There’s nothing to agree or disagree with, just a recounting of past events.

Devon Price:

It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgement.

…

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.

Claire Lew:

A leader doesn’t shape people – a leader shapes an environment.

Dan Slimmon:

Ideas are funny things. It can take hours or days or months of noodling on a concept before you’re even able to start putting your thoughts into a shape that others will understand. And by then, you’ve explored the contours of the problem space enough that the end result of your noodling doesn’t seem interesting anymore: it seems obvious.

Camille Fournier:

So what are the management skills that are needed to achieve [Engineering productivity]? At the first level of management, they look like:

An explicit approach to delegation.

Camille Fournier:

So the next time you find yourself tempted to volunteer to take over responsibility for something from someone who reports to you, pause. Instead of taking it over, ask them what they think the next steps should be. Give your feedback, and let them bring the follow-ups to you in the next appropriate touch base. You owe it to them to stop taking over their work in the name of helpfulness.

Tips to visualise and limit context switching.

Camille Fournier:

If you are (or were) a highly opinionated engineer, practicing making space for information rather than quickly jumping in and sharing your conclusions is a must for leadership growth.

Management and leadership lessons.

Dan North:

Over the last year or two I have been exploring OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—with several organisations, from a few hundred people in size to a couple of thousand. Some are well over a year in, some are just starting out. There doesn’t seem to be much out there in terms of experience reports or hands-on advice so I have tried to capture the advice I wish I’d had when I started out.

An extensive look at what it takes to be a senior engineer.