Nice piece with some good, clear lessons learned. Good read if either you, or people you work with, are in this transition.

A quick read, and a great list. Includes “No”, “Thank You” and “Tell Me If I Understand What You Said”, amongst others. Nice.

“I defined stupidity as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information”

Interesting piece, identifying things that influence us to be stupid. Sounds like a throw-away listicle post, but it’s not. If we could, occasionally, ask “am I about to be stupid?”, and check on the factors he identifies, we might avoid some costly mistakes…

Julie Zhou takes a shot at the always vexed Tradeoff Between Time and Quality (TTBQT, apparently). Smart, as always.

“You might think, But this is how it is. TTBQT is a necessary evil in building anything. But is it?”

Good points about identifying and developing superstars. And then some research: turns out you lose more by keeping a toxic person than by hiring a superstar. Does emphasize that putting up with bad behavior has real, tangible costs.

Some good stuff about using feedback to look forward, rather than emphasizing what went wrong. Also an interesting look at a process Spotify uses for codifying how managers talk to employees about their development. Simple, useful.

Karen Catlin is a coach (and colleague) and advocate for more inclusive workplaces. Her book is a complete, practical and thorough look at the ways managers (and anybody, really) can help improve real diversity and inclusion in the workplace on a daily basis. Super useful as we head into 2019.

The phrase “Manager Mind” popped up in a client session this week, and it helped clarify for me the huge differences between the manager and maker (coder, designer, writer) mindsets. Getting clear on these differences will, I hope, help you be a better manager of makers, or, if you make stuff, help you understand where your manager is coming from.

There’s some really great commentary in here: running one on ones, tips for first-time managers and much more. It’s a set of clear learnings from an experienced, together person (IMHO!).

“Teams look to their leaders to calibrate their responses to stress, failure, and adversity, in addition to understanding what celebration looks like.”

This is a long piece, but valuable. Lots of useful and practical insights gained from building Yammer. A good emphasis on structures and processes that help the leader get out of the way. Good stuff (some of it related to the next post, interestingly).

I’m always interested in “no manager” experiments, and this seems like a good one. No BS, a simple model and some neat ideas (like a “team parent” in charge of the welfare of the team). You’re probably not going to move to a no-manager setup, but you may get some good ideas from this anyway (and if you are, great!).

Nice. A short, practical introduction to three types of tech debt, and also the notion that not all tech debt (like not a financial debt) is bad. Cool.

Enjoying watching the mechanism of Manager READMEs get debated and debugged. Here’s a useful piece on the dos and don'ts.

A large part of the purpose of culture is to have the “defaults” of the organization set correctly. This is a neat post thinking that through - essentially using “nudges” to continually optimize organizational defaults. Cool.

Part three of Steve Rubin’s monster series on hiring: Filtering and Phone Screens.

Part four: The Interview.

My notes on why management is hard: people are unpredictable, mercurial, creative, wonderful, complex. And they are your job.

How are you managing? Rands suggests thinking through a set of questions to review your approach.

Exactly as described in the title. A super resource.

A tough, compact post reminding us what it feels like to be on the wrong end of less than perfect management. Read it, check what how much of it resonates. Adjust accordingly!