“Nice” cultures miss ideas, fail to resolve real conflict, have baked-in inefficiencies.  But “brutally honest”, often a response to “nice”, is as bad.  Respect, connection and caring - hard to do, but they work.

“Good as it feels, this emphasis on niceness leads to poor decision-making and low levels of creativity by limiting the number of inputs a group will consider”

Nice.  And important.

“Building trust must always begin with the manager. It’s only once the manager sets the foundation, that the employee can then begin building upon it”

This is cool: a careful analysis of the “shoulder tap” interruption, how it doesn’t work fro remote employees, and why that might be a good thing.

“When employees go remote, it can feel to decision-makers like some of their control is evaporating into the ether because they can no longer tap those employees on the shoulder and expect immediate answers. But instead of evaporating into the ether, that control instead transfers to the remote employees themselves. This is a good thing”

Incorrectly titled: it’s actually a pretty well-written, and somewhat amusing, post about the cost of interruptions, to anybody (with some emphasis on engineers).  Cool.

One of those “neuroscience proves something we already knew” articles, but still very cool: yes, it works - but why?   Explained.

Nice.  A short list of ideas and approaches that helped Ketan Bhatt figure out his own management style.   Thoughtful, and different.

“Manager READMEs” are neat, and have started popping up all over the place.  It looks like a really helpful process: powerful, easy to do.  Here’s a collection (and the Soapbox Hero product looks kinda interesting, too).  Write your own…

A caustic take on the Awesome Power of Lists - fun to skim (might be behind a paywall).  There’s a much deeper point here: yes, making lists helps, but they have to be lists of things you actually have to will/inclination/inspiration to do…

An interesting and careful take on the problem, with some practical ways forward.  A helpful read.

I love the way our industry throws up enthusiasms, fashions, the “it” thing of the year.  Just thought this was funny.

Lots of great stuff here.  An interesting POV on “social cohesion”: Bezos doesn’t like it.  A much longer conversation to be had there.  For my part I generally agree, but I think it’s a subtle point: you can have respect, connection, and even emotional safety without having “social cohesion”.  Discuss!

A classic communication model, breaking down how to get across what you really want to communicate.  As with many of these models, you may not want to use all the parts all the time, but use them to discern what you are really wanting to communicate (emotion?  thoughts?  logic?  desires?).

Interesting model, and some good tips about basic meeting hygiene.  I’d probably shorten the “ladder” to make it more comfortably useable.  Take a look.

This is a riff on the Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders from last week, but a good one.  Some decisions you can make quickly, with low information, and reverse later, some you can’t.  And, as always, the art is telling the difference.  A good read.

The dev team at Zapier is 100% remote.  An interview with the CTO on how he’s making it work.

Also known as “Maslow’s Hammer” - “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  This just struck me as one of the Classic Tech Mistakes which occurs at all kinds of levels - everything from choosing an algorithm to deciding what business the company is in, so I loved this detailed history and explanation.

If you’ve worked with me, you’ve had this particular rant: your org chart is a simple, necessary, but deeply flawed approximation of your organization.  Fun to see somebody else describing the same idea, with a different spin.  Essential.

This is another of my fundamental points of view: you essential resource is your attention, not your time.  A good introduction: check it out.