My post (from November) on my experience, back in the day, of managing through anger (“Obnoxious Aggression” in the Radical Candor model) - the upsides, and the costs.

Pretty interesting: the value of accepting, and communicating, “we are who we are”, to strengthen culture.

Some great stuff in here: set clear boundaries to the team - who’s in it? Seems simple, but often the boundaries are fuzzy (like: who, exactly, is on the exec team of your company?). Every team needs “a deviant” who challenges the status quo. And a bunch of others, including this:

“Given the difficulty of making teams work, should we be rethinking their importance in organizations?” WTF, right? Give it a read. You’ll learn something,

This is a followup interview to an article I posted last week. It is, again, interesting, and challenging to the idea that “feedback is always good”.

“Don’t tell me what I should be doing differently. You don’t know. Don’t tell me what my attributes or qualities are. You don’t know. Instead, what you do know is what your reaction is to what I’m doing. Your feedback is a distortion, just as it is in music”

Faces generated automatically compared to real faces. Can you tell which is which? If you can now, you won’t be able to in a few years.

The Foldable Phone appears to be this year’s “we built it because we can” product (those of you of a certain age will remember the Apple Newton). Patrick Thornton has a good go at it, and explains why products like this continue to be built. Make sure you’re not building one.

My notes on a set of structural obstructions to an effective hiring process. I spent some years wrestling with these in my operational career, and more recently they have continued to show up with many of my clients. Hopefully this list will help you avoid a few very long weeks and sleepless nights.

A short, but to the point, post on what doesn’t work about technical recruiting, from the POV of an engineer. Pair with this post coming from a similar POV - “you’re not buying, you’re selling”.

A simple list, but worth checking to see how many of these you’re actually doing. Particularly like the idea of a “Stay Interview”.

One of the enduring questions in software companies is: “are we moving as fast as we possibly can to build things?” The answer is highly nuanced, and usually reduced to something like “well I don’t see the engineers here on Sunday”. So it’s good somebody is asking the question carefully and trying to answer it (yes, they are making a pitch, but it’s still interesting).

Exactly that: the complete list, and what to do if one or more people in the team have these behaviors.

A new community for Technical Leaders lead by Marcus. Recommended!

Always good to have another article emphasizing the power of listening. A short, practical and very useful reminder.

“Here’s a leadership truth I discovered that’s served me well: my ears never got me into trouble”

Terrific article challenging the notion that feedback is always good and useful. A longish read, but a subtle one, and well worth getting into. Pair with my post on the Feedback Paradox.

“Deep down we don’t think we make very many errors at all. We think we’re reliable raters of others. We think we’re a source of truth. We aren’t. We’re a source of error”

The always excellent Lara Hogan with a set of tools to clarify and communicate your management and team style. Includes a very nice worksheet for setting out your leadership approach - basically a (good, simple) template for a manager readme. Very cool.

This is great, if a little off the beaten path: a site with definitions of words that don’t exist but should: “sonder” in this case - “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”. Worth having the idea in mind as you go through the working day.

Good stuff on a topic that doesn’t get a lot of attention but should: how do you develop good relationships with your peers? You need stuff from them, they need stuff from you - how to make it really work?

Coaching is a critical management skill, and not an intuitively obvious one. Helpful, practical notes from Lara Hogan.

A good post on an old, hoary topic, with particular relevance to engineers (but still relevant to a much wider group). We tend to be unconscious about meetings: how many, when, who should be there - and yet they suck an enormous amount of time. Get conscious. Make some decisions.

Exactly that: a good set of pointed questions to ask people interviewing for management roles.