jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
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: Feedback |
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: | 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 |
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 |
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 |
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: 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: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
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: Coaching |
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 |
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: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
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 |
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: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
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: | Managing A Team: Other |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions | Managing A Team: Other |
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 |
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: 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...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | 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: 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: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | 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...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 |
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...Other tags: | 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...Other tags: | 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
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...Other tags: | 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 |
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...Other tags: | 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: 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
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: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
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...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 |
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: 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...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions |
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: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching |
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...
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