“Let me know what I can do…” is well-intentioned but not helpful.

A neat thread on ways you actually can help. Helping creates relationships. Relationships are the basis of cooperative working. A useful thread.

Exactly that: trying for happiness in other people is always a tricky project. What to do when it’s clearly impossible.

I like the idea of “relationship debt”, although “relationship damage” might be a more accurate term. A longish post - a useful collection of things to consider and actions to take when you’ve banged the table, yelled and generally acted poorly.

You could pair it with my post on table-banging and other bad behavior: “Is It Ever OK to Lose Your Sh*t? The Joys and Perils of Managing Through Anger”.

“A sense of urgency isn’t the goal. Trying to create urgency reflects the age-old confusion of hurrying with speed — the misguided notion that if you’re not always hurrying, you’re already behind”

Excellent stuff. Read it.

Sometimes a deadline is a deadline. What to do when that’s the case.

Discusses several unhelpful “directions” that a team can be given, the last being “go faster”.

“This kind of binary conversation is really unfortunate, because it means that what engineering teams oftentimes receive as feedback is “go faster please.” And ‘go faster’ is not a particularly useful or actionable piece of feedback”

There’s been some back and forth in the Management community about whether Manager Readmes are a good idea (Camille Fournier went off on them late last year).

I think they are, not least because they force introspection and self-reflection. This is a good example.

A more detailed account of writing a Manager ReadMe, and then finding ways to communicate it and make it useful.

My Notes on why tribes form (instantly!) in companies and how instinctive tribal behavior gets in the way of cross-team collaboration. Why is it hard for Product and Engineering to get along? Sales and Marketing? Take a look.

I think learning when to still the inner voice that is shouting at you “speak up! disagree! make your point!” is one of the great skills in communication.

A good, short piece about shutting up, and how to do it.

A riff on “don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness”, but without the sense of “about to be wrong” that the standard formulation has. Nice.

I’m not a fan of “looking weak” vs “looking strong” as a way of thinking about communication. I am a fan of getting your points of view across effectively, and “verbal qualifiers” get in the way of doing that. This is a good list of such qualifiers (“sort of…”, “well probably…”). Check it out and see which ones you may be using to dilute the effectiveness of your speech.

Three phrases that push a conversation away from dealing with the hard stuff. When these show up, something’s being swept under the carpet (at the risk of mixing metaphors - hard to get an elephant under a carpet). My personal favorite: “we’re all adults…”.

Another good reminder that, particularly in tech, the ground is shifting under our feet all the time, and the practices you have put in place to be efficient in your current business will probably be barriers to dealing with the next big transition.

Very cool. A breakdown of how tricky interactions happen and how to handle them when they do. Clear and informative. Recommended.

“Asking curious questions is all about asking open-ended questions. Try not to lead them down the path you believe to be true…”

My notes on asking open-ended questions. A shorter followup to the article above.

I’ve ended up covering this with every single person I’ve ever coached, which gives you some idea of how often the skill can be useful. And it’s easy (at least to understand - needs practice to do).

My notes on what happens when we are delaying Hard Decisions. You have to tell Jim we’re going to hire him a new boss! But he’ll hate it! Or he won’t!! Maybe it’ll be ok!? Argh! Back and forth, back and forth - time passes, nothing gets done.

What’s going on here, and how to deal with it.

The Conscious Leadership model is pretty interesting. It takes a very simple metaphor (“above the line/below the line”) and uses it to force awareness of how we are acting/responding at any given moment. This is a useful introduction. Take a look.

A pretty neat framework for dealing with disagreements. This particular framework may or may not work for you, but read it so you can think about how you actually do handle disagreements. What’s your framework? Do you have one?

A short piece, notable for the idea of “Dead Letter Meetings” - those zombie meetings that started sometime for some reason and now just occur because… well, nobody can remember why… a good reminder to kill them.