jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Managing A Team: Other |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | 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: One-on-ones | 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: | 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: 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...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Team organization | Managing A Team: Other | 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...Other tags: | 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 |
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: | 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 |
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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
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 |
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...Other tags: | 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...