Always nice to see research back up something obvious: laughter is good for groups (!).  Makes us more creative, apparently, too.  Fun article.

A ton of great stuff, written in plain, direct English.  Who knew big-wig CEOs be so clear?  Impressive.  Among many gems:

“So, the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope”

Cool.  What do you do when somebody starts to slide?  Judge them, probably, which doesn’t help.  A good post about how curiosity can widen your range of options to help another person succeed.

A relatively old post:  a terrific checklist of how you’re doing as a manager. Glance through it, make adjustments accordingly.  Simple, and helpful.

Pretty interesting: a spreadsheet of career tracks to technical leadership, compiled over at the Rands leadership slack.  Lots of neat ways to get there…

Totally loved this.  A dry, HBR article describing one my favorite flaws in human nature: we think we know more than we do.

“It usually takes a large amount of data to strip away the chaos of the world, to finally see the worthwhile signal. However, classic research has shown that people do not have a feel for this fact. They assume that every small sequence of data represents the world just as well as long sequences do”

Nice, short article emphasizing how important directing our attention is when we are listening.  Includes a neat little taxonomy of types of listening.

We are vibrantly, and unconsciously, aware of the emotional states of others.  This (rather weirdly formatted) post introduces the idea of “emotional contagion”, with a bunch of research to back it up.  Wondering why your team is happy?  Depressed?  Check it out.

Pretty interesting.  You’re a tech leader running a company.  Never done sales.  Don’t know much about it.  You’ll make mistakes.  A post about how to avoid a couple of basic ones.

Karen Catlin, Stephanie Soler and I will be doing an “Executive Coaching AMA” this Wednesday evening at 7pm at Domino Data Labs in SF.  We’ll be talking about what comes up frequently in our work with tech companies, how we work, and be open to anything you’d like to discuss.  Come along!  More here.

There’s a lot here, and it’s good.  Whether/when/how to distribute your team(s) will come up eventually when you’re scaling.  This is a dense and thoughtful breakdown of what to consider.

Loved this.  Managers are people.  It’ll take two minutes to read.  Check it out.

Short, pithy, direct, useful.  Recommended.

A long piece, but contains pretty much everything you need to know about managing relationships better at work.  Comprehensive, and clear.

“Work is personal. It’s intimately tied to perception of self, how we measure our worth, the shape of our lives, the sacrifices we make”

Pretty interesting: the top ten meeting questions that managers actually use from a bot designed to do just that.  It’s a great list, particularly for one on ones.

A useful categorization of feedback into “appreciation”, “advice” and “evaluation”, and a note not to mix them (“appreciation” and “evaluation” together would be the dreaded “feedback sandwich”, for example).  Short, thoughtful read.

This is spot on.  There’s a magic number somewhere around 100-150 people where relying on informal communication just doesn’t work (and for some orgs, it may be sooner).  This is a good list of ways to put real effort into communicating what’s going on to the whole org (do it a lot, do it in multiple channels).

Nice.  Some interesting ways of assigning value to decision-making process, balancing cost, potential risk, importance…  A good read.

A really short post, but a good one: a critical part of making a decision is deciding first whether you have to make it.  And if you don’t think you do, how you should communicate that (people like decisions, whether or not it’s the right time).  Cool.

I, along with two other experienced coaches, Karen Catlin and Stephanie Soler, will be holding an in-person event on Wednesday, April 11th at 7pm in SF.  Come along (it’s free).  Or pass this along to anybody who has questions about coaching, their work, their organization.