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