Exactly that: an account of putting together an Engineering Strategy from scratch as a remote CTO. Clear advice on a difficult piece of work.

Super nice post by Lara Hogan about building a team around you to support your leadership work. Your immediate boss doesn’t have to be the only one helping you (in fact, they shouldn’t be). Lara also has some neat tools to help you find and build your crew.

Nice introduction to how coaching feels and what it is vs therapy (for example). If you are thinking about being coached, or thinking about coaching as a manager, it’s a good read.

This is actually an introduction to a neat framework for setting up any conversation. Tight, easy to implement, helpful.

This comes up frequently in Radical Candor workshops: how do I know how my feedback is landing in cultures other than the one I am most familiar with? What is very direct in region A might be imperceptibly direct in region B, and vice versa. Read on.

My notes: I’d say the single most frequent issue that comes up in my coaching practice is the Hard Conversation - or, rather, not having the Hard Conversation. A large part of why we don’t have them is because we incorrectly forecast the consequences - on us, and on our happiness. If we can rebalance our forecasts, we can have the conversations. If we have the conversations, the situation will almost always improve.

Making decisions means making trade-offs. Trade-offs often mean taking on different types of debt. This includes: tech, design, and process. A nice way to be more aware of what you are “leaving for later” in every decision.

Your culture starts early - with the first few employees. “Cultural Debt” is a neat phrase to describe when your culture gets off on the wrong foot. Interesting post.

A good question, answered with some energy.

Complete, useful. If you are building your onboarding process, or know it needs a step up, give it a read. Also this:

“companies who have best-in-class onboarding programs retain 91 percent of their first-year employees, as opposed to only 30% retention of first-year employees by companies who lag in onboarding practices”

Interesting notes from Marcus on the realities of entering a new position and being “onboarded”.

Interesting summary of ways to look at time organization. Includes the idea of “gears” (kind of attention modes) which I haven’t come across before. Rather cool.

Everything I know about digging yourself out of overwhelm — probably the single biggest recurring issue I have with my tech leader clients. Don’t have time to read it? You probably need to…

Good, complete article about dealing with overwhelm: tactics, and deeper strategies (what do you believe about yourself which is driving this pattern?).

“This is an amazing realization: all online multiplayer first person shooters are “just conferences calls with occasional shooting” and now I see WebEx completely differently”

Somebody had to design what a phone would look like. Lead design from the 1950’s.

(Reposting from last week when I included a broken link here)

Great article about one of the more difficult transitions for any group or company: from a small, tight team operating more or less independently, to the first moments of (oh no!) structure and planning.

This transition gets lost in the shuffle amongst stories of growth from 10 to 1,000 or $50,000 to $1Bn, but it’s a tough one, so if you’re in the middle of it, give this a read (or if you ever think you are going to start a company - it’ll happen!).

“When people interact, they end up agreeing, and they make worse decisions - they don’t share information, they share biases”

A short article, but useful. As leaders we have to be constantly balancing conformity (to a culture, to a set of goals, a set of principles) against group think. Forming a strong group is powerful, but it also opens us to a narrowed set of perspectives.

Yep. Communication is how organizations work. And yet we tend to try and get away with a minimal amount (“it’s too hard”, “we’re too busy”). A good, well-reasoned plea for overdoing it.

One of the situations I come across most frequently in coaching is clients either a) avoiding a hard conversation or b) thinking they’ve had it and then being amazed (not to mention confused, upset and many other reactions) that they really haven’t - they sugarcoated the feedback so much that the other person didn’t hear part or all of it. (A classic sugarcoat is to kind of miss out, or smooth over, the part where somebody’s job is now on the line if they aren’t able to meet their commitments).

This post gets to the reasons and why sugarcoacting (“ruinous empathy”) in the Radical Candor model is almost always the wrong thing to do.