Displaying 1 - 30 of 342 in total
Learning Organizations
We all say we want a learning organization, but how do you actually set up your team to do that? This week's episode is about ensuring you're not the obstacle in your ...
Free Buffet
Ever found yourself piling food on your plate(s) because you were in a free buffet? That's what some teams have started doing with the new capabilities they got from A...
All Talk No Action
If your main lens for the outside world and the industry is based on social media and LinkedIn, you're probably getting a very distorted view of reality. It can be dep...
Axioms That Aren't
There are laws of nature, and then there are the things that we tell ourselves are fixed, yet really aren't. How many of the walls around you are of your own doing? Le...
Replacing People
Experience tells that on most engineering teams, there's someone underperforming, either due to a mistake you made or inherited. The question is, what are you going to...
Things Left Unsaid
What you're holding out on saying is holding you back. How many months have you wasted not opening your mouth? How many opportunities? How much frustration has been bu...
The Plan
Are you merely winging it, or did you take a second to consider what you're doing and where you're headed? Being mindful for a few minutes could make all the differenc...
Bringing Your Whole Self
When we censor ourselves and parts of our personality too much at work, it shows. Your team can feel that there's a barrier. Your peers will sense it. Can you unleash ...
No
As we're starting the year, people instinctively choose all the things they want to do. It's like piling our plates at a buffet. But that's a sure-fire way to lose you...
Crafting Collaboration
Anyone can get a few good people to join the team, but turning that into an actual team? That's a whole different game. Are you crafting collaboration? Let's get you r...
Retrofitting
Humans are amazing pattern-matching machines. However, sometimes we extrapolate from a single anecdote and build upon a shoddy foundation. More in this week's episode....
Don't Repeat Yourself
DRY is a rule every engineer knows, but so many leaders forget. We get stuck in loops, going through the same mistakes and wrong moves, expecting the same action to ha...
Annoying Your Team
Of course you care about the team, but sometimes we let that care get in our way. We confuse caring for them with coddling and overprotection, which results in teams t...
Autopilot Hiring
Sometimes, getting so good at something that we do it automatically makes us worse at it. We get the task done and miss the bigger picture. That's what I'm often seein...
Lessons Learned or Not
I recently had conversations with several founders and executives after their companies had a major success or failure. What we get out of these moments (other than fi...
Greedy Leadership Algorithms
Optimizing for the next step ahead of you can get you to a local maxima, but still lead you down the wrong path. As a leader, you cannot fall for greedy algorithm lead...
The Hard Way
Sometimes, even when we're told exactly what mistake we're walking into, we still have to learn the "hard way." Otherwise, we could all spend a year reading a bunch of...
The Testing Hack
Just like we iterate on our products, we need to learn how to iterate effectively on our organizations. Framing things as experiments and tests makes it easier to gain...
Bad Apples
I've yet to come across someone who had a shortage of excuses. When those are then used to justify not addressing problematic people because they are "critical," we cr...
Stop Digging
Death by a thousand papercuts often happens when we neglect particular issues, expecting us to have the opportunity to handle them "seriously" eventually. That neglect...
Anecdote Machine
Understanding the natural thought patterns of your CEO will help you communicate effectively and create trust rather than lose it. One such aspect is the "anecdote mac...
The Wet Table
The ingenious use of paper towels to unlock business value and how that connects to your team's autonomy and agency. Are people sitting on their hands waiting to be to...
Excuse Rapidfire
Just because it comes to you so easily, it doesn't mean you should allow that behavior to guide your thinking. Yes, coming up with reasons why something won't work is ...
Single Stepping
Single stepping might be a good way to debug some gnarly code, but it won't cut it as a leadership practice. Without learning how to step back and look at things at a ...
Segfault
You ask for something simple and then get a deer in the headlights look from the other person. The lack of autonomy and agency can hit us everywhere, mcdonald's, resta...
On Par
Effective leadership enables rapid growth, adjusted to each person's current situation and abilities. You can unlock dramatic success by aligning around simple yet imp...
Affordances
The mirrors in our apartment got me thinking about affordances and deliberate organizational experience design. Are you making the right things accessible?Join my free...
Getting Risky
Risks are unavoidable in our day-to-day work. Yet many of us need some "calibration" of our treatment of risks. Many tech-oriented people have a risk appetite that dif...
Caffellatte
For more than a week, I kept saying the exact same thing at the same caffé in Rome, and we got a different drink almost every time. Communication is weird. Words are v...
Fear
Fear has two opposite ways of harming how you lead—do you freeze or do you roll over? Either way, fear-driven leadership is not really leadership. You can short-circui...
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