Longish post - has some specific points to make about skip-level one on ones.

“The focus is whatever the member of the team wants it to be. Your role as a manager is to listen, perhaps ask a few guiding questions, and to learn by listening”

Exactly what it says!   Great resource.

A bit long, pretty funny, very insightful, riffing on the idea (from the book Sapiens), that humans put together “collective fictions” (like “Waterfall”, or “Agile”) to help us work together.

“None of them are evil, so it’s not like you’re picking racism over socialism or something. Whichever one you pick is not going to reflect the reality, but if you expect perfection you will be disappointed”

“I think programmers should pay much more attention to listening to and working with their peers than to rituals and tools, and that we should be skeptical of too much process or methodologies that promise to magically make everyone more productive…”

Research on how people want to receive bad news. Guess what?  They want to know!  Worth remembering next time you’re vacillating about giving hard feedback (in Radical Candor terms, you’re in “Ruinous Empathy”).

My post (reworked) on the concept of “HR Debt” - the cost of not taking care of organizational/people issues.  And how Radical Candor provides a way forward.

Fun to read.  Smart people playing with, and inventing, expensive toys (historical note: this feels kind of how Xerox PARC felt from the outside way back in the late 70s).

“Junior people we evaluate on effort. Senior people we evaluate on outcomes”

A useful heuristic for judging your feedback to first time managers, professional execs, and everybody in between.

A good set of thoughts about how tradeoffs change as a company, and a CEO, grows.  Undogmatic, practical, useful.

My notes on why finishing, really finishing, a software project is always hard (hint: writing software is a creative act), and what to do about it.  This perspective - that managing software people is more like managing writers than “engineers” - is one that I think is useful and I’ll be writing about again.

Feel free to follow Tech People Leadership on Medium, by the way.

How does Amazon stay at day one?  Good question.  A clear, but iterative, framework for encouraging and iterating new ideas, it turns out.  Very cool.

I like the metaphor: it’s instantly recognizable.  Some things you’re juggling you can drop and they’ll bounce, and some, well, won’t.  Includes some ideas about how to distinguish between the two.

Asking a simple question about leadership metaphors in an interview can give you an idea of how a new lead will look at the job.  Easy, useful read.

Some tactics for asking, clearly, for what you want without banging the table.  I would add: practice asking out loud, either to somebody you can role play with, or just to yourself.  Saying what you want out loud has a surprising power to it…

A deeper approach to assertiveness, nicely expressed.

“…assertiveness isn’t about control or bullying. It’s about honoring yourself while also honoring those around you”

I just liked this: a detailed explanation of how we go the dialing screens we have now, and how we might get better ones.  I love careful design essays!

This is just a neat little tool, and a nice exercise in minimalist design.  “Habit trackers’ are a great way of motivating yourself to stick with: writing, exercising, eating properly - whatever it is.  Most of them are overdesigned and get in the way of establishing the habit.  This one doesn’t.  Give it a shot.

Love this.

“At their heart, effective processes are not about adding red tape — they are about enabling ‘flow’”     Yes.  Exactly.

A good reminder of the basics of delegation and why a “coaching mindset” (guide, don’t direct) works, with a quick intro to the GROW coaching model.  A short, valuable post.

Basic, short, useful.  Start with “Why”, then listen.  (Sometimes easy to say, hard to do - stick with it).