jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | 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: | Technical Leadership: Other | 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: | Managing A Team: Other |
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 |
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...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...Other tags: | 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: 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...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...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...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
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 |
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.
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