“Feedback left unspoken limits our potential as humans”

A good, clear, fundamental argument for the need for feedback. Easy read, great perspective.

This is long, but very worthwhile. Explains why feedback is so hard to give, and includes recommendations for overcoming the deep, human barriers that inevitably exist.

“Feedback conversations, as they exist today, activate this social threat response. In West and Thorson’s study, participants’ heart rates jumped as much as 50 percent during feedback conversations” Yikes.

An older post of mine: people are imperfect, unpredictable and sometimes a little crazy. Our job as leaders is to love them anyway.

Marcus points out that just “empowering the team” without setting guard rails leads to lack of focus, inefficiency and unhappiness.

Very short, but necessary: the things we do, immediately, when somebody disagrees with us (hint: everything except listen carefully).

“Clarity and certainty are not the same thing. Sometimes being certain keeps you from being clear because you are operating out of closed-minded assumptions instead of critical facts. Secondly, just because you have a lack of clarity does not mean you have workplace drama, but I can guarantee that, if you have drama, there is a lack of clarity at the root”

To get better at anything requires repetition, mindfully considered. A good, short reminder, with a neat case study.

Less about app design and more about how the language we use to describe processes changes how we design the processes themselves. Cool, thoughtful, intelligent article.

Pretty wild article. Wasn’t sure what to think in the end. Important reading.

“We found that even among similarly high-performing workers, appearing self-confident did not translate into influence equally for men and women… Moreover, women’s self-reported confidence did not correlate with how confident these women appeared to others.”

Nice, practical set of suggestions for making sure everybody gets, and stays, involved. Simple, direct, useful.

Benedict Evans writes at length about Tesla. Not sure about his conclusions, but enjoyed the analysis. What kind of company is Tesla? Energy, transportation?

This is pretty great. Practical advice for a new VP Engineering. Includes this perfect gem: “Partner absurdly closely with product and make sure you understand priorities and the head of product understands tradeoffs”.

A pretty nice use of Quantum mechanics as an analogy for setting up management structures. Yes, people are not mechanical entities: “Setting up your team the way you would set up a machine can give you a ton of leverage — as long as you realize how complicated and unpredictable the people in that machine can be”

Thorough and useful: a deep examination of how to kick off a project well.

Very nice set of clear distinctions in the roles. They are different, and confusing them can lead to not helping when, as a manager, you want to help.

Interesting. Not sure I go along with the examples quoted (I’d have to guess that Juicero didn’t do MVPs), but it’s useful to have our religions challenged from time to time.

Some basic, but still helpful ways of digging yourself out of the rut.

Yes, gathering information, tools and approaches is very easy these days, and can lead to total paralysis. “However, the problem is that you do everything except taking action”. Quite.

This is a hard, but necessary read about a company culture gone badly wrong. Being “edgy” is not an excuse to behave badly.

Try and ignore the formatting and the giant ad for a book at the top. This is very well worth a read.

“Dignity is something we are born with—our inherent value and worth. We don’t have to do anything to have dignity. Every human being deserves to be treated with dignity, no matter what they do. Respect, on the other hand, has to be earned.”