jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
All categories: Resources by category
Subcategories: Coaching, Conflict/Difficult Discussions, Delegation, Diversity, Feedback, Managing Individuals, Meetings, Offboarding, One-on-ones, Other, Remote
Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
A very short but effective set of google slides on the importance of small frequent feedback, Some Ad-Hoc thoughts about PIPs by Roy Rapoport who writes well on these topics. I wish there was a similar example for positive feedback, which is at least as and arguably more important than negative. A more serious responsibility of a team leader than catching mistakes on any particular task is helping your team members excel and grow. One important way of doing that is, when someone does something...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader - Gergely Orosz A reader wrote in referencing this article saying that it was useful particularly in the context of a growing research software team supporting multiple projects - providing a structured way to delegate while promoting the team member’s development and responsibility. And it is a great article! The idea is that, rather than as the team leader you run all of the projects in your team, you tap your team members to run them, with...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback - Jaewon Yoon , Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal and Ashley Whillans A nice older article that crossed my desk again arguing that you’ll get more open and useful input from a broader range of people people by asking for “advice” than “feedback”. As always, you don’t need to follow every piece of advice you get, but you should at least take the advice seriously enough to consider.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Strategy: Prioritization |
Scaling yourself as an engineering manager - Sally Lait When our responsibilities grow, we need to grow too. That means focussing on the truly important, not doing the things that simply don’t make the cut of the priority list, getting the help you need. Not discussed in this article, though it’s at least as important, is delegating tasks and efforts you know how to do well and were doing previously to your team members, helping them grow as well. This article also gives some time...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
Own Your Feedback (Part 1): Receive Better Feedback by Asking - Padmini Pyapali We’ve talked about giving feedback to our team members, but we need feedback, too - from our managers, or researcher’s we’re supporting, or other stakeholders. Pyapali makes some specific recommendations for getting good feedback from others. They all involve asking, and how to ask: Be Timely and Specific - you’ll get better feedback if you’re asking soon after the thing you’re asking about, and if you ask specific questions Provide a Reason...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Managing A Team: Other |
Tough Love for Managers who Need to Give Feedback - Lara Hogan Stop Softening Tough Feedback - Dane Jensen and Peggy Baumgartner, HBR Both Hogan and Jensen & Baumgartner’s article tell us not to soften our critical feedback. If we’re not frankly telling our team member how they’re not meeting expectations, then how can we possibly expect anything to change? And if we’re not trying to change future outcomes - by learning that the expectation wasn’t reasonable, or by having the team member meet the...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Three Feedback Models - Jacob Kaplan-Moss A quick overview and comparison of three feedback models, similar to what we covered when we were talking about performance communications in , but includes one I had forgotten, Lara Hogan’s Feedback Equation: Lara Hogan, an author, public speaker, and coach for managers, has a Feedback Equation that is quite simple: Observation of behavior, e.g. “In your review of Jane’s pull request, you gave her clear advice on test coverage…” Impact of the behavior, e.g. “… this helped her...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Alignment | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Managing A Team: Other |
A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable - Dave Bailey A lot of research computing team managers - especially those of us who came up through the research side - aren’t great at holding the team accountable. It’s pretty easy to understand why - the whole idea of being accountable for timeline and scope is a bit of an awkward fit to that world. Something took longer than expected, or someone took a different tack than they had committed to earlier? I mean, it’s...
Continue...Other tags: | Hiring: Other | Becoming A Manager: Diversity |
Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team - Gergely Orsoz, Sarah Wells, Samuel Adjei, Franziska Hauck, Uma Chingunde, Gabrielle Tang, and Colin Howe Hiring a diverse team, especially in research computing, is not the default. As empirical evidence, I offer… *gestures widely*. Therefore, default processes won’t get you there. With that the case, and because there’s moral and effectiveness imperatives to making sure you’re not excluding good candidates from opportunities on your team, then you need to change how the processes play out, which means...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Strategy: Managing Up |
Managers should ask for feedback - CJ Cenizal Cenizal makes what should be an uncontroversial - but relatively uncommonly followed - point that managers should be routinely asking for input on their own behaviours and leadership from their team members. This is much more easily done if there are routine one-on-ones, if the ask for input is also routine (not necessarily every one-on-one, but frequent), and the manager has a habit of demonstrating that they take such input seriously and are comfortable talking about their...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Code Reviews | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Code Review is Feedback - Linnea Huxford A reminder that code review isn’t just about the code in question, it’s feedback. So that means it’s an opportunity to give nudges to inform future behaviours (code submissions), it’s an opportunity to give positive as well as negative feedback, and it’s important that all team member are providing consistent feedback.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Strategy: Alignment |
Don’t Assume Consensus In The Absence of Objection - Candost Dagdeviren Most people don’t like the conflict that comes with disagreement, and people especially don’t like disagreeing with their boss. Not hearing objections, particularly objections to something you’ve said, does not mean there’s no disagreement. It just means there’s no voiced disagreement. So as Dagdeviren points out, you have to go out of your way to elicit disagreement. “What are things that could go wrong with this approach”, “what things does this miss”, “what are...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Hiring: Onboarding |
The Thirty Minute Rule - Daniel Roy Greenfield We’ve talked a lot about having explicit expectations in your team, especially around communications. It’s been on my mind having changed teams very recently. Your team does have expectations about how people work together. (You’ll find this out very quickly if a new team member starts behaving very differently from team norms!) The only question: do you have those expectations written down somewhere? Having expectations explicit makes it easier for new team members to spin up, and...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Are You Sugarcoating Your Feedback Without Realizing It? - Michael Schaerer, Roderick Swaab, HBR We have to work harder to keep connected with our remote teams now, but that doesn’t mean we stop giving corrective feedback about things that aren’t going well. In fact there’s probably a lot of new expectations about “how we do things”, and there’ll have to be a lot of nudges to get people on the right path. This article talks about one problem that people have giving positive but especially...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
We Have to Have a Talk: A Step-by-Step Checklist for Difficult Conversations - Judy Ringer There’s one thing I’d add as a preamble to this article. If things have advanced to the point with one of our teammates where we’re going to have the sort of conversation we need to brace ourselves for, it is almost always our fault, at least in part. We didn’t have to let things slide this long. Giving consistent feedback about small things, even if uncomfortable, will allow you to...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Create space for others - Will Larson One of the hardest things about a transition to leadership, either on the people-manager or technical-leadership track, is stepping further and further back from directly making contribution and spending more time making room for others, nurturing their contributions, and gathering their input. In this article, Larson describes how that works at the Staff+ Engineer level at large tech companies.
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Meetings | Strategy: Alignment | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Learning with Fist of Five Voting - Jake Calabrese We’ve talked before about the benefits of not asking your team binary yes/no questions about agreement but “on a scale of 1..5”; e.g. in #39 when mentioning the use of zoom polls. This gives people who aren’t comfortable with a direction a way to express that without coming out and saying no. And if a number of people vote 1 or 2 or 3, that will give them a bit more confidence in discussing why. Calabrese...
Continue...Other tags: | Hiring: Other | Becoming A Manager: Diversity |
Markets, discrimination, and “lowering the bar” - Dan Luu There’s a common, dumb argument that there can’t be sustained discrimination in a competitive hiring market place, because competition would have gotten rid of any such inefficiencies. Needless to say trying to negate actual reality with pure thought doesn’t work well, and Luu’s article here puts this article to rest. This is an older article that is extremely relevant to the hiring process text above; how you aren’t trying to hire some “best” candidate out there...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Strategy: Working across an organization |
9 Tips for Effectively Sharing Peer Feedback in the Workplace - Mara Carvello Worth comparing this to what we discussed earlier on feedback. Carvello councils use of on-judgmental language, and focus on the problem not the individual; those are consistent with talking about behaviour and impact. Be prepared to have a conversation - makes sense when talking with peers. We’ve talked in other issues about how the “feedback sandwich” approach is known not to work; the way to “cushion” negative feedback with positive feedback isn’t...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Common management failures in developing individual contributors - Camille Fournier Fournier writes about some common ways that managers - especially new managers but I’d argue it’s quite common even in more experienced managers - fail to develop the skills of their team members. While we’ll often make time for a team member to learn some new framework or to read some papers in a new area, building them up in their technical/product leadership ability is more rare. Not only is this a wasted growth opportunity...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Technical Leadership: Other |
A thorough team guide to RFCs - Juan Pablo Buriticá We’ve written before about design documents architectural decision logs (e.g. #33) and using collaboration around documents as a form of asynchronous meeting (e.g. #49). Usually the thinking is that someone in charge has initiated the document. Buriticá writes about team member-initiated requests for comments as a proposal for a change or the creation of something new, which can then go through a comments phase like a PR, and an approval phase where whatever decision making...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Managing A Team: Other |
The lettuce pact: The ultimate hack for giving difficult feedback - Brennan McEachran, Hypercontext If you’re struggling to figure out how to improve your team’s frank but kind feedback to each other, McEachran has a suggestion. Riffing off a discussion from the Radical Candor team, the suggestion is to make things concrete, with a personally embarrassing but minor situation like someone about to give a talk with spinach between their teeth. They clearly have a right to be told, and there’s clearly better and worse...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Alignment |
That Burning Feeling When You’re Right - Roy Rapoport Rapoport reminds us that being right is nothing. Seeing the correct path to take is table stakes. If you can’t convince others to join you on that path, nothing will get accomplished.
Continue...How to become a Good Lab Manager, Elizabeth Sandquist, ASBMB Today This is an older post but it’s one of the most read on the ASBMB blog, and it was posted on twitter again because the upcoming ASBMB meeting will have a workshop on the topic. The post is well worth reading, and extremely relevant to us. Its top tips, which Elizabeth expands on extremely well, are: You can learn management skills. Have a five-year plan for your lab. Set clear standards and expectations. Optimize...
Continue...Do Introverts or Extroverts Make Better Leaders? Wally Bock I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the population of people who have chosen (a) research and (b) computing for a career tend to be introverts, and that can make the transition to managing other human beings a jarring transition. But managing well is a set of skills, and there is no one who finds all of those behaviours - seeing the big picture, sweating the details, working closely with people, working closely with abstractions (and all simultaneously!) - immediately natural. “When looking at...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions |
The Subtle Signs Your Team Is in Trouble - Rachel Muenz, Laboratory Manager An older article that Laboratory Manager sent around on twitter this week. It’s written in the context of laboratories, but carries over very clearly to research computing teams. They mention two opposite signs to look out for: Lack of conflict/disagreement - I think this is a great one, and easy to overlook. If you have a bunch of technical people in a room and there isn’t some steady level of (healthy, respectful)...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
Building trust — with people and software - Tal Joffe Tal uses technical analogies to management-of-humans concepts. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good idea! but the basic concepts are important enough that it’s worth trying a lot of different approaches to reach different audiences. Here, he addresses one of the key goals of one-on-ones; building trust with direct reports. The analogy is between say testing your alignment and agreement on a number of topics in one-on-ones with running tests on code bases; in both...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
How to Coach Employees? Ask these One-on-One Meeting Questions - Claire Lew, KnowYourTeam The Ultimate 1-on-1 Meeting Questions Template - PeopleBox All of the above approaches require knowing your team members well - how well they’re doing what they do now, what they’d like to do next, and where they have untapped strengths. Regular one-on-ones, where the focus is on the team member and not on you or on status updates, are by far the best tool we have to learn these things and to...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions |
Buster Benson on the art of productive disagreement - Buster Benson, Brian Donohue Why We Need to Disagree - Tim Harford We’ve talked before about the lack of disagreement on a team (especially a technical team!) being a bad sign, and about how Google’s Project Oxygen found that psychological safety (which is very much about being willing to express disagreement) was one of the most characteristic features of successful teams. Tim Harford article emphasizes the importance of disagreement, and points out that some of the...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
How To Run A Free Online Academic Conference - Franklin Sayre, Tisha Mentnech, Amy Riegelman, Vicky Steeves, Shirley Zhao Successful research computing projects build a research community around them, but not always on the scale where throwing a national or international conference or workshop to bring practitioners together seems like it would make sense. And even if it might make sense, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to test the idea first, to see how it goes? This evolving Google Doc distills what the...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Stop Rushing In With Advice - Michael Bungay Stanier, MIT Sloan Management Review Don’t Fall Into the Advice Trap - Michael Bungay Stanier and Marshall Goldsmith One trap that’s really easy to fall into for those in either technical roles or in research — and so doubly easy for those in research computing — is rushing to give answers or advice to our team members. We got where we are by being experts in stuff, and so it’s very easy to just naturally give answers...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
How to manage one to ones - Dan Moore, Letters to a New Developer I’ve shared several posts here about one-on-ones from our point of view as a manger; this one is written as advice to someone starting out as an initial contributor, focusing on what they should be aiming to get out of a one on one. Whichever side of the conversation you’re on, it’s worth spending some time thinking about what the other person should be aiming to get out of these conversations!...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Feeling Recognized at Work May Reduce the Risk of Burnout - Lab Manager The headline says it all; this reports on a study that reports the titled result. There’s a lot going on right now, and your team members are feeling a lot of pressure from a lot of directions - make sure to honestly recognize their work and their accomplishments. And right now, working at anything approaching normal productivity is an accomplishment.
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Moderating Discussions over Video - Beth Andres-Beck Working remotely and communicating online doesn’t really introduce new problems so much as it greatly amplifies exiting problems that can otherwise be papered over with in-person interactions. Some meetings are pretty straightforward and translate well to online - standups, or team status updates. But it if you want to have a brainstorming meeting or a meeting to come up with a new solution to a problem - or even choose which problem to solve - rather than just...
Continue...How to Create the Perfect Meeting Agenda - Steven G. Rogelberg, HBR The title oversells the blogpost here, but Rogelberg suggests one useful and relatively easy thing to do to improve agendas, and it ties into one of bullet points from above about covering the goal of the discussion clearly. The article suggests that instead of having vague agenda items like “Revisiting performance of data ingest module” or “New system uptime” they should instead be clear, focussed questions “What changes could drop data ingest times...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Working With A Research Community: Other | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Organizing a Conference Online: A Quick Guide - Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier, Chelsea Miya & Casey Germain Two weeks ago I included another resource for putting together an online conference; this one explores does more to the range of different outcomes you might want a conference to have — what would make you think this conference you’re considering was successful? — and how you could arrange a virtual conference to achieve that. What’s more, it goes into a couple possibilities for ways that a virtual...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
The Research Computing Teams One-on-one QuickStart Guide - Jonathan Dursi Here’s a short concrete plan to get started doing one-on-ones with your research computing team. For each weekday, there’s about 10 minutes of reading and another 10-15 minutes of homework to do to get you started doing one-on-ones with your team starting one week from when you begin. There’s follow-up activities in weeks two and three to take stock, make tweaks, and start thinking about tools that will help.
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Who’s Thinking? - Alex Martynov I’ve written earlier about the benefit of coaching employees — not just giving them answers to problems (which is a hard reflex to suppress given that we’ve gotten to our positions by being knowledgeable and having answers) but coaching them to find the answers themselves. They’ll probably find better answers (they’ve been wrestling with their problems for longer than you have and understand the nuances better), you’re developing their problem-solving skills, and you spend less time doing other people’s jobs....
Continue...Maker vs Multiplier - Pat Kua There’s an old joke about becoming a 10x developer by spending your time helping ten other developers become twice as effective. I think this article is a nice way to distinguish between the contributions of individual contributors and those doing “glue work” like us managers (not that you have to be a manager to be doing multiplier-type work).
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
14 questions to ask an underperforming employee during a one-on-one meeting - Clair Lew, Know Your Team Good question types to get to the root of why an employee isn’t performing well on some kinds of tasks. They come in two categories: Looking inward, to find: “How have I been letting this person down? How have I been getting in the way?” Looking outward, to find: “What on the employee’s end is limiting them? What choices or capabilities of their own are keeping them from...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Success Factors in R&D Leadership - Gritzo, Fusfeld, & Carpenter, Research-Technology Management This is a paper from a few years ago which took a look at leadership development data from 47,000 respondents; both managers and those evaluating them, in R&D and outside of R&D, and compared the two. They found - well, it’s hard to read it any other way than R&D managers were generally worse managers than non-R&D managers: When the results were consolidated, R&D managers were rated more favorably than their non-R&D counterparts...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Team organization | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
How to Get Your Team to Challenge Your Ideas - Dave Bailey We’ve talked before about the importance of having your team being comfortable to disagree with you and offer alternative suggestions. One thing I like here is two sets of suggestions, depending on whether you tend towards over- or under-assertiveness: For the typically over-assertive Adopt the question reflex. Aim for balance in hearing everyone speak. Avoid generalization. For the typically under-assertive Over-prepare. Learn some facilitation techniques/helpful phrass Be vulnerable. Confusingly, I tend towards a...
Continue...Growth - Fred Wilson A VC describes growth he sees in several of his new technical leaders. He sees two different syndromes in them; it’s much easier for him to grow the “Deer in headlights” new leader as opposed to those suffering from the incorrect confidence of “I got this”. Relatedly, if you find yourself managing a new team, this from Claire Lew is a good primer on getting ready for a first team meeting.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other |
The Engineering Manager Event Loop - David Loftesness via Chris Eigner This isn’t new, but I really like the idea: what a generic tech software development manager should be thinking of daily, weekly, and monthly on people, projects, processes, and themselves. It’s not quite right for research computing - thinking about recruiting and hiring on a daily basis is to put it mildly not the regime we’re normally in - but a lot of the other items hold up. What other changes would we have...
Continue...How to expand conflict capacity in times of crisis - Marlene Chism We’re all tired and stressed right now, and it’s easy under those circumstances for small things to cause conflict where it normally wouldn’t. This is something that we can work on, but it takes some time and practice. Pay close attention to things that trigger unhelpful reactions, try to be aware of them as they come up and short-circuit them, and then buy some time saying you’ll get back to them and step...
Continue...Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things - Michael Schneider, Inc Google’s New Manager Training - re:Work, Google Effective Management for New Managers - Angela Riggs I’ve written about Google’s Project Oxygen before in this newsletter — an effort that launched half-expecting to find that technical management didn’t matter ended up discovering that it very much did. Project Oxygen was the effort to better understand which management behaviours improved team performance, and their re:Work effort is their (largely...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Meetings | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Remote brainstorming for regular humans - Bartek Ciszkowski Whiteboarding and brainstorming are harder to do when the team is distributed. Here are some suggestions for Ciszkowski on how to do distributed brainstorming: Do it in ~20 minute chunks with 5 minute breaks Use a simple white boarding tool (Ciszkowski suggests excalidraw which I hadn’t seen before) or even just a screenshared google doc to record responses. That way people can visualize connections between ideas to trigger new ideas. Periodically restate to your objectives to keep...
Continue...Time Machines & Leadership: 10 things I wish I knew at the start - David Boyne Written for new managers, but it’s always worth revisiting the basics. David Boyne gives ten items he wishes he knew earlier, with 3-6 specific tips for each: Look after yourself Plan ahead Hold effective meetings Communicate effectively Make time to learn (especially about management) Keep your hand in the day to day work while you can, but… Learn to let go Have the team improve (retrospectives, data, individual growth)...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software - Gergely Orosz Proposals and Braintrusts - Nathan Broslawsky These two articles both describe approaches to usefully open up architectural or other proposals to input from a group. The first, an “Architecture Jam”, is sort of half-brainstorming, half-architectural white boarding session; it can work remotely, but is definitely synchronous. The second is more asynchronous - writing up a proposal, and sending it off to a group of people whose job is, explicitly, to improve the proposal. Either...
Continue...New Manager Training: The 4 concepts to Teach - Claire Lew, Know Your Team Being Glue - Tanya Reilly If you’re at the point where you’re starting to manage (or develop) team leads or managers, Clair Lew’s article and collection of resources on four things to teach new managers is useful. Her four concepts to teach (which she covers in details with resources to use to to teach them are): The mindset shift: IC → Manager. (This is so important; no promotion or job change is as tough a transition as your that move from...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other |
You Might Not Be Hearing Your Team’s Best Ideas - Michael Parke and Elad N. Sherf, HBR We’ve talked about the importance of disagreement and input before, and how important it is that people feel ok speaking up. This is another article on the topic, and it breaks the steps down into managing what people are saying but also managing the silence, what people aren’t saying, which I think is a useful way to think about things.
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
Making Space to Disagree - Meg Douglas Howie I know I keep hammering on this, but it’s such an important topic, and people keep writing good articles about it. In our line of work our team members are generally experts or becoming experts in various areas, and if they’re not comfortable speaking up and disagreeing — with each other, or maybe more importantly, with us — not only are you losing incredibly valuable input, you’re also running the risk of eventually losing them. There’s a...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Active Listening for Managers - Rachel Hands Why you Can’t Just Ask Why - Lorin Hochstein As a manager, learning to be a better active listener - drawing information out of people, helping them reach their own conclusions, digging deeper, restating the speaker’s thoughts in your own words to make sure you understand - is really valuable. It’s a useful skill for talking with your teammates, but also stakeholders and your own manager. And it really helps me to focus on conference calls - when...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Diversity |
Managing for Neurodiversity - Anjuan Simmons This is a short and useful discussion from an experienced tech manager about managing team members who are expressing behaviours that might suggest neurodivergence: They simply receive information about the world and process it in different ways. In fact, no two people see and respond to the world in the same way. We all need to make accommodations for these differences whether we’re talking about introversion, extraversion, autism, or dyslexia. The thing I like about this article is it...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing A Team: Other |
Don’t Create Chaos - Stay SaaSy How to Lead Decisively when you Don’t Know What’s Next - Karin Hurt and David Dye, Let’s Grow Leaders Making Decisions with Others - Deepak Azad “Great leaders vacuum up chaos” - The Stay SaaSy post uses this as a nice way to describe one really important function of managers. We have to be entropy-fighters, reducing chaos and uncertainty about how a project will go forward, what priorities should be, what are good next steps for a team members...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Models for conflict resolution – choose the right one for you - Andy Skipper, CTO Craft Leading Through Conflict - Scott D. Hanton, Lab Manager These two articles cover how to deal with conflict in the technical or laboratory workplace, each with several resources to follow up on. (Disagreements are not themselves conflict! Technical people of any field in any team should be cheerfully, respectfully, disagreeing with each other all over the place.) Both start, sensibly, with the fact that conflict comes from somewhere -...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Handling difficult conversations - Rachel Hands, Managing Equitable, Effective, Teams As above, difficult conversations don’t get easy, but they do get easier. And once you’re a manager, as Hands says, It’s imperative that you, as a manager, initiate tough conversations when the need arises. There’s no way through but through, though, so Hands recommends identifying what’s making you uncomfortable about having the conversation so as to defuse it a little bit, and then to focus on the (very specific, observable) issue at hand and that...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
How to Turn around a Disengaged or Underperforming Employee - Lighthouse Tactical Challenges In Hiring Junior Engineers - Cindy Sridharan These two articles benefit from being read together. The topics are quite different but they both speak to the need for managers to invest time in new and/or struggling team members. In research computing we tend to both not reassign or remove employees who aren’t good matches and not invest enough in employees who are struggling. It’s a bad combination, it hurts team morale, it...
Continue...8 Leadership Myths Every Manager Should Know About - Kate Dagher A bit basic for long time readers, but it may be useful to send new managers (or someone you’re growing towards management), and it’s always useful for us to remind ourselves of the basics. Of the below, I’m still working on not leading everyone the same way, and bringing others into the spotlight. Even though I know intellectually those are the right approaches I still tend to use my default settings on all my...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Simple Burnout Triage - Ben McCormick McCormick suggests one simple question for your team members to make sure they’re not edging towards burnout: If you take the pace & quality of the last 2 months of your life and repeated it again and again, how long would you be able to sustain it? If you get an answer ranging from “I could make this work, but..” to “I can’t go on like this”, then that raises increasingly serious red flags. The only non-worrying answer to...
Continue...How to Call Out Racial Injustice at Work - James R. Detert and Laura Morgan Roberts, HBR At the beginning of the summer there were a flurry of articles on addressing racial or other systemic injustices in the workplace. Unfortunately those have died down a little bit. This HBR article discusses how to call out racial injustice at work - it could just as easily be used to address issues of gender inequality, or dealing with any systemic issues. The steps Detert and Roberts suggest...
Continue...Noticing Change - Aviv Ben-Yosef One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that research computing is important enough to do with professionalism, and that professionalism is nothing more than being deliberate about what you’re doing, while continuously learning from what you and others have done. Learning from what you and your team has done necessarily means noticing that there’s been a change. And there’s no way to systematically notice improvements - or regressions - without gathering data, taking notes, and otherwise keeping track...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Bucketing your time - James Stanier, The Engineering Manager We’ve talked about organizing tasks in buckets before - In Issue 37 I’ve mentioned my experiments with trello, and in Issue 39 I linked to an article about having a “dashboard” that covers both issues, things to keep an eye on, and future-looking work. This is a nice article about why I find these approaches work well for me - it’s a way of systematizing the discipline of not just getting lost in the day-to-day while...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding |
OffBoarding as an Engineering Leader - Iccha Sethi We’ve had a few articles here about your-first-90-days at a new job; this is an article about your last days as a manager as you move to a new position. Sethi mentions several areas to focus on: Your team - informing them, and documenting pending performance issues, salary, equity, or promotion status, and then informing them of the departure Documenting the status of the team as a whole and their projects Documenting the status of any projects...
Continue...Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis, and what can we do? - Neil Chue Hong This is a talk that Neil Chue Hong gave at the 2020 International RSE Leaders Workshop. The numbers he gave are UK based - he’s with the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK - but they’re pretty grim. UK research software developers (RSEs) have as low or lower percentages of people who identify as women or are black, asian, or other ethnic minorities in the UK than either...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
Meeting everyone on a new team - Anna Shipman Last time we talked about leaving a team, this time an article about doing one specific thing when joining a new team as a manager or director - speaking with every person in your new organization. Shipman describes having 30 minute meetings with each person in her new 50 person organization over the course of several months. Long time readers will recognize it as looking a bit like the first half of a weekly one-on-one; mostly...
Continue...The Management Flywheel - Camille Fournier One of the huge challenges for managers - which can be overwhelming for some new managers - is that changing people systems is hard. And all problems are people problems. Fournier points out that managers that try to get out whatever problem their team is facing by saying “We’ll Just Use Technology X” or “We Just Need The Right People” are probably not going to succeed. In her experience, and mine, there’s no big-bang change of people or technology...
Continue...It’s Management, Not Micromanagement - Kristen Heyer, The Success League Heyer pushes back on the fears that new managers often have of being “micromanaging”: Many newer managers confuse management with micromanagement. One of my favorite books on the topic of micromanagement (My Way or the Highway) defines it like this; “Micromanagement is when participation, collaboration and oversight interfere with performance, quality and efficiency.” Unfortunately, management (oversight that adds to performance, quality, and efficiency) often gets confused with micromanagement. I agree - and I’ve seen way...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Delegation |
Help, I’m a Research Computing Manager! - Jonathan Dursi, SORSE event At the really nicely run SORSE event last week, I gave my 10 minute pitch that research computing actually prepares you pretty well for the advanced skills managing needs, we just need to shore up the basics. The basics I covered won’t be of a surprise to any readers - one-on-ones, feedback, delegation. The talk and the resources I recommended are on the page; also, I updated my one-on-ones quickstart guide (PDF, epub) that...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity | Managing A Team: Other |
Do Your Employees Feel Safe Reporting Abuse and Discrimination? - Lily Zheng, HBR If we want to support our employees, especially team members who experience sexism or racism, we need to make sure they have opportunities to report that abuse and discrimination. Although our teams are typically small, we’re often in large institutions which have mechanisms that can help, such as employee assistance plans (EAP), explicit offices for EDI or that handle sexual harassment or racial discrimination complaints, or ombudsman offices. It’s our responsibility to...
Continue...What is expected of a Engineering Manager? - Rodrigo Flores Flores, a manager of managers, has a nice article on what he expects of his managers. In priority order: Support the members of your team and help them grow. Follow along the deliveries, setting quality standards, making sure the team has the support they need and upper management the feedback they need. Keep a constant practice of creating, improving or eliminating team or company processes. Note the order. A recurring bit of advice from people...
Continue...Leading People With Experience - Mark Wood A common issue - one in retrospect I’m sort of surprised didn’t come up in the recent “Ask Managers Anything” round - is what to do when you’re placed in a position of managing or even being team lead someone with more experience in the job that you have. This happens all the time, and it especially worries new managers or team leaders who haven’t quite understood the role yet - in a software developer team they might...
Continue...4 Tips for Addressing—and Even Embracing—Tension - Holly Bybee & Lauren Yarmuth Tension between ideas is good and healthy and normal in technical teams, and Bybee & Yarmuth talk about how to address it and harness it constructively. Observe the dynamic Give it a name - call it out Just start making - Don’t try to sort out the tension on some abstract plane, start doing something to make things concrete Assume good intent - Keep in your and your team member’s minds that it’s...
Continue...No More Misunderstandings Paraphrasing - When, Why, and How - Padmini Pyapali A reminder of a powerful technique for communicating with anyone - your boss, your team, or stakeholders. Double check understanding, constantly, by asking questions about what the other person has said, paraphrased in your own words. Paraphrasing is a great approach but the more fundamental method here is being aware that you may not have understood what was meant by the other person.
Continue...I’m deaf, and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call - Quinn Keast Another reminder that our sudden working from home doesn’t affect all team members in the same way. Keast, who is profoundly deaf, relies on lip reading for verbal communication in person; but that works much more poorly over videoconference where there’s a lot less information. This article is a good reminder that while many people require various accommodations, and many of those accommodations “work”, they are still a...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Managers: What do you do when your teammate shares their grief? - Lara Hogan Hogan, taking lessons from her mothers pastoral care when she was going up, shares some humane steps you can take if someone unexpectedly shares grief with you over a significant tragedy in their lives. These steps are human for both the team member and you. The steps are: Have a handy, simple response ready - Hogan has a few to hand such as “Oh, I’m so sorry” or “That sounds incredibly...
Continue...Starting a new manager relationship - Sally Lait A lot of us in research computing become managers by being promoted within an organization, so we sometimes have the advantage (and disadvantage..) of an extended handover process between the previous manager and you. Lait here describes her preferred method for taking over a team in such a situation: Initial hello and quick backgrounds - can be done in a group setting 1:1:1 handover - previous and new manager + team member meetings, find out current state...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make - Michele Solis, Scientific American A key responsibility of ours as managers is to make sure our team members are growing in their skills and abilities. Solis’ article summarizes recent work with simple game-like settings where participants learn, for instance, which symbol in the game is worth more. The authors demonstrate that the participants learn faster when its their choices that drive the learning rather than when they’re guided through the choices which show...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
End Micromanagement: 6 Signs You’re a Micromanager (And What to Do Instead) - Dara Fontein The Most Important Management Concept You’re Missing: Task Relevant Maturity - Lighthouse Relatedly, one of the big questions new managers have is how much managing is too much - you don’t want to micromange. In research computing the default is to come down on the side of way, way too little managing. These two articles read together I think help clarify things. Fontein’s article outlines common micromanaging signs, and I...
Continue...Preserving Culture When Someone Leaves the Team - Mark Wood Whether people are leaving or joining, as managers we have to be deliberate about the team we’re helping build. Wood points out that when someone leaves, you have the opportunity and responsibility to think about what behaviours that person had that shaped the team, and what you’ll do to replace those - asking other people (maybe including yourself) to do some of some of those things to fill in the gap, hiring someone who will...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing A Team: Other |
Say “No” to Triangulated Feedback - Esther Derby This one hits a little close to home this week. Derby’s article talks about the perils of “triangulated” feedback - team member A tells you something about team member B and you bring it to team member B. A team is a group of people who are accountable to each other in working to a common goal. By being a cut-out in these accountability conversations we short circuit these needed conversations, eroding trust, and give ourselves a...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
Why Capable People Are Reluctant to Lead - Chen Zhang, Jennifer D. Nahrgang, Susan J. Ashford, and D. Scott DeRue, HBR In a study of 400 MBA students, three risks held people back from stepping up to lead, in projects or in taking decisive action: Interpersonal - risking friendship/collegial relationships Image - “I don’t want to seem like a know-it-all” Accountability - “I’ll be blamed for bad results” As we try to make sure our team members have growth opportunities, and increase their scope by...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Technical Leadership: Other |
Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. - Will Larson When I was asked at my SORSE talk if it was possible to be both lead developer and manager, I replied that anything was possible but it is really, really hard. The most stressed I’ve been in the last couple of years was when I’ve had both significant technical and managerial responsibilities - they are completely different skillsets requiring your mind to be in different kinds of places. Bouncing between the two is definitely playing...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity | Managing A Team: Other |
Building neuro-diverse team culture Here’s an evolving collection of resources which may be of use to managers to support current or future team members with ADHD, Autism, or Dyslexia.
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding | Managing A Team: Other |
Your Star Employee Just Quit. Will Others Follow - Art Markman, HBR Maintaining a strong team isn’t an activity that ever stops. We need to actively, constantly, be building the team - by supporting team members development and career goals, by giving them new challenges, and by bringing in new team members or developing and keeping an eye on a “bench” of possible candidates. It’s not necessarily indicative of a problem by itself that the member is leaving - it’s good and healthy for people...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Questionable Advice: “How do I feel Worthwhile as a Manager when My People are Doing all the Implementing?” - Charity Majors> The Non-psychopath’s Guide to Managing an Open-source Project - Kode Vicious, ACM Queue Majors’ article is a good reminder for new managers that it’s really hard to recalibrate job satisfaction or the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve moved into management. All you can do is focus on the big, long timeline stuff while still taking joy in the little moments, and make sure that...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing Your Career: Other |
Writing Is One of the Best Things You Can Invest In, as a Software Engineer. The More Experienced People Become, the More They Tend to Realize This. - Gergely Ortoz Speaking of non-technical skills being underrepresented in technical job descriptions… Communicating well is absolutely essential part of a job in any interdisciplinary endeavour like research computing, and written communication is becoming absolutely vital as teams go remote. That doesn’t necessarily mean particularly good grammar or vocabulary - we’re an international community, many in our community...
Continue...Getting Over Your Fear of Giving Tough Feedback - Said Ketchman, The Introverted Engineer Research: Men Get More Actionable Feedback Than Women - Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, and Jo Silvester We’re people who went into both research and computing, and so as a population we are disproportionately task-focussed and introverted. That can make giving negative feedback - especially about work practices, maybe less about work outcomes - deeply uncomfortable. And humans avoid doing things that make us uncomfortable! But your team members deserve to know...
Continue...Snowflake retros - Mike Crittenden While retrospective meetings are useful for all kinds of research computing work, software development is main area where retros happen so often and regularly that they can start to get stale. Crittenden suggests avoiding that by making each one unique - setting up a rotation of both the person who runs the retro and the format of the retro (there’s a link to 10 different retro formats) to have them regularly changed up. As a postscript - I can not...
Continue...The skill of naming what’s happening in the room - Lara Hogan, LeadDev There are a number of meeting skills which can certainly apply to manage a team but are powerful skills to have in other contexts, too. In what may be a first for the newsletter, Hogan appears twice in one issue with articles from two different venues. In this LeadDev article, she describes one powerful and under-used skill - actually describing what’s happening in the meeting. An example from the article: ‘Hey, let’s...
Continue...Mentor, coach, sponsor: a guide to developing engineers - Neha Batra A good overview of the different ways we can contribute to a team member’s development: Mentoring: sharing your experience so an engineer can leverage it themselves. Coaching: asking the right questions to help an engineer reach a solution that works for them. Sponsoring: giving stretch projects or opportunities to help an engineer grow. Of these, mentorship is the least valuable - our experience may or may not transfer over. Working with our team members...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Ten simple rules for writing compelling recommendation letters - Jennifer H. Kong, Latishya J. Steele, Crystal M. Botham, PLOS Comp Bio Writing recommendation letters is part of life in research. If your team member trusts you enough, when it’s time for them to move on here are roles where you may be asked to provide a reference. And trainees you or your team members work with may ask you or them for a reference. Kong et al. offer their ten rules - some that strike...
Continue...Thoughts on Engineering Management - Ben McCormick McCormick writes a series of five articles on technical computing management. The broad topics won’t be a huge surprise to readers, but they’re good reads in that they’re all in a very coherent voice and philosophy: What EMs do - focussing on facilitating information flow, driving progress forward, and building a sustainably productive team - and that all of those are time consuming Choosing what to work on - which does a good job of separating the focus...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Remote | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions |
Virtual “Storming”: How to Work through Tensions with New Teams - Nobl Academy A lot of heist movies have really clear depictions of Tuckman’s four stages of group development. Forming is the initial “the team is brought together” sequence, where a group of individuals comes together for a common (nefarious) purpose. After the initial honeymoon phase, when the hard work begins, comes the Storming phase - the individually brilliant but mismatched group initially has conflicts as they try to figure out how to work together....
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
Private 1:1 Notes Template (Google Doc) - Don Neufeld One-on-ones are an incredibly useful tool for listening to your team members, and building up the trust so that they’ll actually tell you things. Over time you’ll learn a lot about your team members desired career development, and between those and setting and reviewing goals you’ll get good information about their strengths and gaps. Periodically reviewing those one-on-one notes and distilling them into some key “headline” areas - and keeping those headlines updated - is an...
Continue...Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings - Joseph E. Mroz, Joseph A. Allen, Dana C. Verhoeven, Marissa L. Shuffler, Current Directions in Psychological Science As a manager, one of our responsibilities is to keep people aligned and disseminate information. One (one!) tool available to us are meetings, which can be extremely efficient when run well and continually improved; but ugh, how many meetings have we gone to that aren’t that way? We actually know a lot about meetings, what works...
Continue...The Tools Don’t Matter - Ken Norton Just a reminder that as technical folk, we tend to jump straight to tools when we’re starting to manage projects or teams for the first time. I’m flat out embarrassed by how long I spent choosing planning tools, processes, etc when I started out in my current job. It had the advantage of feeling like accomplishing something, but it was basically just stalling the harder work of managing projects, products or teams - communication. Norton has a list...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Why a Positive Offboarding Experience Matters More Than Ever - NOBL As a rule, people won’t retire from their jobs with you. It’s always good to be prepared for any given team member to leave (make sure everything’s always documented, use one-on-ones to have a good understanding of what everyone’s working on, use techniques like pair programming/PR reviews or talks and demos to disseminate knowledge. The post on NOBL makes the following suggestions: Make sure your off-boarding checklist still makes sense in a post-pandemic world...
Continue...Ramadan Mubarak! - Ramadan Tips for Non-Muslim Friends of Muslims - Fahmida Kamali Ramadan is here, and Kamali offers some tips for those of us who are non-Muslims to be supportive to and non-weird around their Muslim colleagues during this period of fasting. As Kamali points out in a twitter thread, working from home does not make it easier to fast (do you find yourself eating less working from home?) and we could all use a little extra support right now. In this slide deck,...
Continue...How to have meetings that don’t suck (as much) - Danielle Leong More and more collaboration occurs asynchronously these days, but meetings are vital for coordinating that collaboration. Meetings are also routinely done really poorly, and academia is (or should be) famous for how poorly they’re done. Whether we’re having a meeting to make a decision, solve a problem, gather input, share information, or point everyone in the same direction, Leong calls out some things that should be crystal clear: Who is leading this meeting?...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
How to Run Effective 1:1s - Luca Rossi The big guide to One on Ones (1:1s) for Managers - Matt Nunogawa It’s always good to refresh the basics, especially when hearing from someone new. Rossi emphasizes, correctly in my opinion, the relationship-maintenance aspect of one-on-ones - maintaining the lines of communication is at least as important as what is communicated in any particular one-on-one. He also has this nice image about how having a scheduled opportunity to touch base frequently makes it much easier to...
Continue...Inclusion in a Distributed World - Christoph Nakazawa Most of our teams are going to be moving to some kind of hybrid model of distributed and office work, and this mixed approach is notoriously difficult to get right. So it’s important to start figuring out now how to make the transition and what the future will look like. Nakazawa talks us through some of the issues - principally, if there is an “in office” and “remote” split in the team, it is really really easy...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing A Team: Other |
What Good Leaders Do When Replacing Bad Leaders - Andrew Blum At some point in your career, you’re going to step into a role as a leader where the previous leader made a hash of it. They weren’t necessarily a bad person or incompetent, but for whatever reason what they were doing wasn’t working. Blum talks about how to manage that transition. A key point for me is an early sentence: Good leaders create a separation between the past and the future. Creating that rupture...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
What if you dread 1:1s with a direct report? - Lara Hogan, LeadDev You’re not going to look forward to all one-on-ones equally. If there are some you find yourself dreading, that’s an indicator light that something needs looking at in the relationship, on your side or theirs. After digging into things to understand what’s bothering you about the meetings or relationship, figuring out what you need, and making clear to yourself what is and isn’t your responsibility, Hogan suggests working with your team member...
Continue...How Men Can Be More Inclusive Leaders - David G. Smith, W. Brad Johnson, and Lisen Stromberg, HBR If something - anything! - is truly important at work, then you adopt and communicate it as one of your small number of priorities, learn about it, set targets for it, and have transparency and accountability for those targets. Then you try stuff, listen carefully about why current approaches are and aren’t working, and iteratively make changes to what you’re trying and the targets. Smith, Johnson, and...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing - Karla Miller, Washington Post Office spaces aren’t equally welcoming environments to all of us. Here Miller points out that for many potential team members, distributed work can mean less of the constant low-level stream of bullshit they’d normally experience in a predominantly white and male workplace. This point: Working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as […] being mistaken for another colleague of the same race...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity | Technical Leadership: Open Source Management |
Open Source Communities Need More Safe Spaces and Codes of Conducts. Now. - Jennifer Riggins, The New Stack Codes of conduct in Open Source Software—for warm and fuzzy feelings or equality in community? - Vandana Singh, Brice Bongiovanni, William Brandon, Software Quality Journal Riggins walks us through the need for codes of conduct for open source projects, pointing out the rather shocking statistic that women make up less than 3% of open source communities, and that this has been stagnant for two decades. Between higher...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Other |
When a 1:1 turns into a vent session - Yihwan Kim One-on-one 101 - Tiffany Longworth, Clickety The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster - Michael Lopp A couple good articles on one-on-ones from a a couple of weeks ago. In the first, Kim offers five pieces of advice around vents. In particular, vents aren’t about problem solving, they’re about letting something out - and that something has been festering for a while. So Kim’s advice is: Don’t rationalize, and definitely don’t interrupt Don’t assume...
Continue...How to manage former peers as a new manager - Claire Lew It’s kind of goofy that one of the most awkward situations for new managers to navigate is the most common situation we put people in for their first management role in research computing - taking their old boss’ job and managing their peers. This is not actually a difficult role - you have a huge advantage over taking over a new team both by knowing the work of the team and the team members,...
Continue...Filtering your language as an engineering leader - Rob Begbie, LeadDev Borrowing Lines from Great Leaders Around You - Lara Hogan, LeadDev Everyone who’s managed or been a team lead for long enough has had the experience of thinking aloud or asking an idle question and then having a team member waste hours following up on what they thought was now a Suddenly Important Thing. As a manager we need to stay involved in the work enough to understand what issues are likely to come...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
The Hotel Giraffe - Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose There’s a lot in here about stress, how it builds up, and how it’s hard to see sometimes from the inside. Lopp has four questions he asked his team members during a previous job: On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 == low, 10 == high): How stressed are you right NOW? What is your IDEAL stress level? Ideal meaning the stress is useful and not debilitating. What is your MAX stress level? What behaviours...
Continue...Good Meetings - Sara Drasner The purpose of the meeting is clear There’s an agenda (we’ll dive in to the complexity of this in a moment) There are the right people in the room. Not too many where communication is overly complicated, not too few where the people you need to move forward aren’t there. There’s some order. People aren’t dropping in and out, talking over each other, or being generally inconsiderate There’s a clear decision, outcome, and next steps at the end Some points...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Remote | Managing A Team: Other |
Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work - Cate Huston Huston has been working remote for over five years, and for those of us getting ready to continue working remote for real and without a pandemic driving it, suggests three key approaches: Embrace async. Enable autonomy. Build connection. Crucially, these are all team-enhancers for in person teams, too: Even for team members all going to the same office, meetings can be hard to schedule, unnecessary meetings are bad, and having written documents outlining how...
Continue...Timeboxing: The Most Powerful Time Management Technique You’re Probably Not Using - Nir Eyal I’m a little surprised to see that timeboxing hasn’t come up on the newsletter as often as I would have thought - it was one suggested strategy out of five in one article we covered in #53. It’s a very useful technique for making sure you get things done, and for scoping those things. Problem with a to-do list include: Many of us aren’t great at breaking down the to-do items...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Remote | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing A Team: Knowledge Sharing |
Easy Guide to Remote Pair Programming - Adrian Bolboacă, InfoQ Bolboacă walks us through the how and why of remote pair programming, and InfoQ helpfully provides key takeaways (quoted verbatim below): Remote pair programming can be an extremely powerful tool if implemented well, in the context where it fits. You need to assess your current organization, technical context, and the time needed to absorb change before rushing into using remote pair programming. There are useful sets of questions for that. Social programming means learning easier...
Continue...Out of Office Alert: Managers Need Vacations Too! - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow It’s important to take time off to recharge, even though as managers we’re often not great at this. It’s a little too easy to convince ourselves that our firm hand on the till is too important to completely let go… and that’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’re robbing yourself of needed R&R, and your team members of the chance to step up in your absence, by not completely checking out. And the more...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing A Team: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Words Matter: Is Your Digital Communication Style Impacting Your Employees? - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow “We need to talk”. “Fine.” These all messages or responses that would be very uncomfortable for us to receive from our boss; but when things are busy it’s pretty easy for us to communicate in exactly that way with our team members or peers. Your boss (probably) isn’t a jerk, and neither are you, but when we have a lot of things on our mind it’s easy to not pay...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding | Managing A Team: Other |
Three ways to lead effectively when you fire somebody - Sarah Milstein, LeadDev If you aren’t communicating effectively with your team, that won’t stop people from thinking and talking about the meaning behind actions; it’ll just encourage that thinking and talking to go somewhere farfetched and ugly, unburdened by facts. We don’t like to talk about firing, and it doesn’t happen often (enough?) in academia or R&D but it does happen; that relative rarity makes it all the more dramatic. Even someone who chooses to...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
The Final One-on-One: 7 Questions to ask When Offboarding Employees - Anita Chauhan, Hypercontext If people do leave, we should celebrate that - growth and development and moving to new roles is good and healthy - even if it’s a pain for us. In addition, a team member leaving can be a good time to get some unvarnished feedback if you’ve spent the time together building a good working relationship. Chauhan recommends some questions, including: Is there anything we should be aware of as we...
Continue...Management as a Technology - Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Harvard Buisness School Working Paper 16-133 Management is important, and the issues involved are complex, and like a lot of things that are important but complex, it’s the subject of a lot of study. That study looks different than those of us who came up in the natural sciences are used to - people systems are way harder to examine than, say, fluid systems - but it can be every bit as insightful....
Continue...Let’s Discuss Attrition - Subbu Allamaraju We’ve talked about people leaving before, and that post pandemic such departures will rise. Allamaraju reminds us that this is good and healthy and not to freak out: Attrition is natural Reasons for attrition vary Attrition is an output - you can only control the inputs In my team we do a relatively good job of celebrating new opportunities for team members where they go. This is one of the things academia I think does right - recognize that...
Continue...How Many People Can Someone Lead? - Pat Kua Whenever I give my “Help! I’m a Research Computing Manager!” talk, this is a question I get. Kua here says 5–7 (I often say 7 ± 2), but says it depends and gives a very helpful list of things it depends on. It includes the obvious things (a more experienced team - individually and working collectively as a team - requires a little less of a manager/lead, so you could lead more of them; similarly a...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
How to coach an employee who is performing well - Claire Lew, Know Your Team Researchers not taking enough time for career development - Sophie Inge, Research Professional News (paywalled) As managers, the tendency is to focus on problems, and on team members who aren’t performing well in their current tasks. As a result, team members who are capable and already growing tend to suffer from benign neglect; but this isn’t fair to them, and it’s a missed opportunity for the manager. Someone who’s already...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
How to Get Your Silent 1-on-1s Back on Track - Emmanuel Goossaert Whether it’s trust issues, or just overwhelm, one-on-ones can get quiet from time to time. For almost any other kind of meeting, if the meeting is short because there’s not much to say, that’s a win! But the purpose of one-on-ones is maintenance of a line of communication, more so than what is actually communicated in any given week. If that line of communication isn’t functioning, we as managers need to do the...
Continue...How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors - Camille Fournier Fournier has coached a lot of managers, and she shares some common failure modes of new managers: Doing all the technical design work yourself Doing all the project management yourself - your team members will need to learn those skills as they advance Neglecting to give feedback Hoarding information - intentionally or unintentionally Focussing on the their own output and not that of the team
Continue...Stand-up Meetings are Dead (and what to do instead) - Ben Darfler, Honeycomb Blog What if daily standups, but for an hour? Darfler describes how Honeycomb has switched their standups - from the usual short round-table format to a daily hour long gathering (a “meandering team sync”) that includes social time, and then a collaboratively-edited catch all agenda of work items. Rather than being formulaic, it becomes the standard place for team-wide discussions (technical or process) and also explicitly includes a social component. Darfler finds...
Continue...You can be directive without being a jerk - Lara Hogan Being Nice and Effective - Subbu Allamaraj I think one of the hardest things for new managers - especially those coming from the very hands-off collegial culture of research - is determining the right amount of directiveness appropriate for a given situation. The usual failure modes, in order of the frequency which I see them, is the very common laissez-faire absence of direction and the less common tech-lead-becomes-manager “do this, this, then that, and...
Continue...Owning your power as a manager - Rachel Hands One of the common mistakes I see in new research computing managers is an unwillingness to actually accept the fact that they now have a position of power. This is especially true when the new manager has been promoted to a manager of previous peers. For a lot of people, suddenly having power is uncomfortable, and that’s ok (it’s way better than the other failure mode, of really relishing the newfound power), but you can’t just...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Don’t Soften Feedback - Lara Hogan Reader, I’m not proud to say that I’m actually pretty rubbish at this. I tend to very much want to soften negative feedback, which is easier for me but is in the long term worse for the team member and the team as a whole. What’s worse, people are not uniformly affected by this. Women, Black, Asian, and Hispanic team members tend to get softer and less-actionable feedback, especially but not only from male managers, which holds back their...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
The Best Leaders are Feedback Magnets — Here’s How to Become One - Shivani Berry Relatedly, if we want to grow, we need good, actionable, feedback. In our industry, a lot of our directors are pretty hands off, which certainly has advantages but means we don’t get the guidance we’d benefit from. Berry has two broad categories of recommendations for how to get more feedback and accelerate your growth: Learn how to accept feedback well - manage your knee-jerk reaction, think of it as an...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Managing A Team: Other |
Delegation is a superpower - Caitlin Hudon, Lead Dev It’s true! But, superpowers sometimes take some practicing to use effectively. I personally am pretty good at the mechanics of delegating when I think to do it, but too often find myself taking on a responsibility so as not to bother anyone else with it, or because only I can do it (well, yes, if no one else gets a chance to learn how to, I guess I am the only one who can do it)....
Continue...The missing millions: Democratizing computation and data to bridge digital divides and increase access to science for underrepresented communities - A. Blatecky et al Research computing and data are increasingly important for STEM fields, so if we want STEM - and R&D careers - to be available to all, we need to make sure there are as few barriers as possible to being fluent with computing and digital research infrastructure[*], and to having it accessible. More selfishly - we readers of this newsletter are all...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
A guide to quarterly planning (plus a template) - Nicole Kahansky, Hypercontext Kahansky gives an outline for a quarterly planning meeting. Quarterly is an excellent cadence for planning (and even performance reviews) for a lot of research computing teams; long enough between meetings that meaningful amounts of work can be done, but short enough to be able to react to our always-changing environment and needs. Kahansky outlines a five-point agenda: Retrospective on last quarter Brainstorm on what could be done to make a significant difference...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Prioritization |
Your Calendar = Your Priorities - John Cutler Cutler points out that our scarcest resource is time. There’s a saying in policy circles “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your priorities/values are”; in research computing managerial work, where our budget is typically pretty constrained, it’s our time which reflects our implicit priorities. Those implicit priorities may not be what they should be! Looking at your calendar (and making sure your calendar reflects what you actually do - e.g. blocking off time for...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Tech 1-on-1 ideas & scripts - Rob Whelan Here are some scripts or ideas for discussions for one-on-one meetings with team members, broken up into four categories of situations: Nothing from me - skip this one? Everything is (really) fine This is fine (on fire) Something has to change They’re short reads but useful for clarifying your thinking before going into one-on-ones; certainly for new managers and it’s always worth refreshing on the basics.
Continue...The Void of Empowerment - Aviv Ben-Yosef Ben-Yosef talks about the void managers and leaders of successful teams can feel in steady-state when, frankly, they don’t feel needed. Stuff is working well, there are relatively few fires to put out, and the Universe is unfolding as it should. But that’s success. It gives options for growth, letting you take on new responsibilities while delegating work to team members for their growth. One thing I really like about this article is a distinction it makes: working...
Continue...Not everyone can become a great leader… - Matt Schellhas This is a good first-person account of how pernicious the whole “great leaders are born not made” nonsense is. Schellhas talks about being held back from becoming a manager for years because he didn’t look or seem the part. He did, in the end, become a (successful) manager and leader, and recognizes how at least he got the chance eventually, many never do. On top of discouraging people who don’t look and act like they...
Continue...14 strategies to shorten lengthy meetings - Hanna Ross, Fellow.app It’s been a little while since we’ve had a good meeting article in the roundup. This one covers some ground we’ve seen before, but meeting management is so fundamental that it’s always worth reviewing. Ross’s points, slightly trimmed for length: Have a clear purpose and agenda for the meeting in advance, and send background materials - can’t emphasize this enough. Agendas and materials are important, but without an underlying purpose, you have no way to...
Continue...Managing people - Andreas Klinger This is a bullet-point list aimed at new managers, and so there’s some basics here - but it’s always useful to review the basics, and we always have new members joining the list (hi!) including new managers. I like this list because it expresses a lot of ideas that have come up on the list before, but in ways I haven’t read. I wouldn’t necessarily express all of those thoughts this way, but it’s useful to get another take on...
Continue...8 Tactics to Help Manage Perfectionists at Work - Alexandria Hewko, Fellow Blog Our community, at the intersection of research and tech, tilts towards perfectionism. Being committed to doing things well is great! And, like all good things, it can be taken to an extreme which becomes dysfunctional. I think we all can recognize the signs of perfectionism; Hewko suggests an approach to leading a perfectionist on your team. First is (as with all team members) to acknowledge, to yourself and to them, their positive...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Gratitude Is More Powerful Than You Think - Chiara Trombini, Pok Man Tang, Remus Ilies, INSEAD Knowledge Even in the with high levels of stress and overwork during the pandemic, simply expressing gratitude was enough to make a measurable impact on healthcare workers job (and even personal) happiness. This was especially true for doctors and nurses in this study who identified strongly with their job. It is so easy to say thank you to your team members and give them positive feedback. It’s also really...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Managing A Team: Other |
The 3 Ways Leaders Can Create Feedback Culture At Work - LifeLabs LifeLabs has a very short illustrated ebook to view or download - there’s a button to give your email address but you don’t need to do so to look at or download the PDF. (As a general rule I don’t recommend even pretty good resources that end up with you on a mailing list) This ebook talks about the benefits of leading with feedback, and modelling the desired behaviour. The key piece, on...
Continue...Everyone’s a great manager until they start managing - Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale, Raw Signal Group Four mistakes I made as a new manager - AbdulFattah Popoolah, LeadDev What you give up when moving into engineering management - Karl Hughes, Stack Overflow Blog When we see people do a different job than we do — especially when they do it very well or very poorly — it’s easy to think “that doesn’t look so hard”. Plumbing, graphic design, customer-facing roles; we watch for a while...
Continue...Management Development As Skincare Regimen (Twitter Thread) - Angela Riggs So how should you start learning the new skills you need to be a manager? Riggs has one way to think about it. I’m always on the lookout for new analogies for management, leadership, and strategy. For management I personally like sports metaphors, but they’re so overused that every ounce of insight that can be extracted from those comparisons have long been exploited. I’ve always found war and combat metaphors distasteful and aggrandizing, and now...
Continue...Run your day, don’t let the day run you - Kahlil Lechelt A manager or leads’ day in research computing is much busier and filled with a wider variety of demands than we’re used to as an IC. It’s vital to maintain some sort of control over the tasks you’re working on. Lechelt gives good advice: Everything goes in a task list - email is not the place to store to-dos. Have a small list of things you will get done today, leaving slack in...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
Good mentors boost integrity, survey finds - Erik te Roller in Haarlem, Research Professional News An important part of our jobs is mentoring juniors and trainees in our team, but also from research groups. Indeed, even the PIs we work with we’re often mentoring in some kid of technical area. It turns out that matters in a number of surprising ways. Juniors who are well-mentored then go on to be less likely to commit research misconduct. It’s not hard to imagine how that might be;...
Continue...The Uninspiring Manager - Matt Schellhas Too much of what I imagined an excellent manager should be early in my career (not having really seen any) was focussed on personal characteristics. Such leaders should be engaging, people-persons… and inspiring. It’s not that any of those things is bad, of course. Those are all traits and behaviours that can be put to good use as a manager or lead! But so can the default behaviours of quiet, attentive, carefully-thinks-before-speaking introverts. Or of keep-ticking-things-off-the-list achievers. Or of...
Continue...Energy Management for Newer Managers - Cate Huston One of the first things new managers discover is that they have to abruptly switch from having a relatively few deep tasks they’re working on to many tasks, much of them fairly small. So there’s a lot of discussion and about task management and task management tools. (Note “task management”, not “time management”. It’s not a power given to we mere mortals to manage time. We manage tasks. One of the key skills new managers have to...
Continue...Making The Leap from Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager - Natalie Rothfels & Doa Jafri, Reforge Speaking of promoting a team member to manager - Rothfels and Jafri talk about the challenges faced by an individual contributor taking on their first management role, and the skills they need to learn. I like their discussion of them, binned into five categories: Hone concise, clear, context-driven communication (including bridging communities and having tough conversations) Developing emotional regulation and self-reflection (someone can’t lead others if they’re constantly freaked...
Continue...How to refactor meetings as they grow with the rule of eight - Jade Rubik Rubik shares a guideline — a meeting with more than eight people isn’t effective as a decision-making meeting, and so: When you have more than eight participants, you either need to change the format of the meeting, or you need to restructure the participants (and you usually want to do some deeper work on communication and organizational structure). There are some good examples of redesigning meetings, either shifting their focus...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Sometimes, after giving lots of feedback, you still need to have The Talk with a team member about them underperforming and it becoming a serious problem. If you find yourself and your team member in that unpleasant situation, this is a pretty good outline of how to have the conversation with the right balance of firmness and compassion.
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
How to Run an Organized Town Hall Meeting - Alexandria Hewko, Fellow Town Halls are a pretty common format in our discipline, and… they’re often not great. They’re ad-hoc, mostly prepared talks, and so generally not super well-received (and, thus, not generally well-attended). Why bother if you can read the slides and the Q&A afterwards, right? We’re all busy. Hewko gives some advice for running a town hall which is actually a community event rather than a broadcast from HQ: Have a recurring meeting cadence...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Having Career Conversations - Joe Lynch As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, mentorship only goes beyond cheap advice-giving if you’re willing to dig in a little deeper to the questions and answers being presented to you. Part of every manager and lead’s job is to support the career development of their team members. And that means having career conversations with them. That means digging deep. Lynch prods us to go beyond the superficial of what the team member says their goals are, and...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
The pushback effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and age in code review - Emerson Murphy-Hill, Ciera Jaspan, Carolyn Egelman, Lan Cheng, Comm ACM 2022 When we’re assessing the technical merits of a code contribution, and by extension assessing letters of reference etc about a candidate’s technical merit, we need to be aware of these effects - non-white, non-male, and older colleagues get significantly higher pushback for PRs, controlling for number of lines changed, readability, and other effects.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact - Brie Wolfson, First Round Review We start off in tech with ticket trackers and to-do lists, and tend to carry that through to our first leadership jobs. But they’re inadequate when you become a manager or lead. As a leader you no longer have the comfort of merely being responsible for set of discrete tasks that can be independently ticked off. You’re probably not even only responsible for individual projects. No, you’re...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
How to run a Retrospective - Chase Seibert Siebert writes this in the context of sprints, but this short and solid how-to for running retrospectives applies to any project. (A sprint is just a a mini-project, after all - it has well-defined objectives, along with a beginning, middle, and end). Siebert probably feels that actually following up on the retrospective is out of scope of an article on how to run the retrospective meeting, which is fair. Don’t take that as a sign that the...
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