Dates covered: February 4-10, 2019 (week 6 of 52)
Business
What Does Your Corporate Brand Stand For? (via Harvard Business Review)
This article has some exercises to help guide executive teams through a set of questions to examine their company’s identity, mission, culture, competencies, values, and other such traits. The process can help strengthen the company’s brand, clarify the relationship between mother/daughter brands, suppose business development, evaluate targets for acquisition, and reposition their brand image.
To Reduce Emergency Room Wait Times, Tie Them to Payments (via Harvard Business Review)
Other industries have ways of minimizing wait times; the wrinkle with emergency departments is that arrivals aren’t planned. The article goes through a description of why the system is the way it is, and proposes that there be incentives for reduced wait times and penalties for longer ones.
Communications for Better Technology Deployments (via Communication for Technologists path)
I’m listing this under “Business” because the core focus is on the communication and tools involved in launching a product. It’s a mixture of marketing, business, communication, and technology. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, just understanding the fundamentals in this course will at a minimum help you understand some business aspects that may help you in your job.
Career
Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves (via The Software Mentor)
- I’m only doing it for my family
- My spouse “understands”
- All I need is one startup to “hut” and then I can slow down or retire
- I’ll make it up by spending “quality time” with my wife/kids
How to Tell Your Boss You Don’t Want a Promotion (via Harvard Business Review)
Most of us wouldn’t consider turning down a promotion, but this technique is useful to have in your playbook should you need it. Do: thank your boss for believing in you, explain why you’re currently in the right role, communicate that you’re interested in growing. Don’t: paint yourself into a corner, allow yourself to be pushed into a job you don’t want.
Culture
How do we learn to work with intelligent machines? (via TED)
The recent focus on AI has ended up “sacrificing learning in our quest for productivity.” Learning on the job where AI is involved is getting more difficult, because people never get to learn how to do those difficult jobs. In one phrase — see one, do one, teach one — people get to see one, but rarely do one. AI can help coach and connect. Right now the companies that are focusing on AI learning are targeting formal training, not on-the-job training where much of skill acquisition lives.
The Mythical 10X Programmer (via The Software Mentor)
“Great teams bring out the best in each other.” This article goes back to the source material of where we get the term “10X programmer” and calls out some flaws in the correlations. The takeaway is that instead of having one 10X developer, use the synergy effect to make each person better. A few other points from the article…
- Measuring how much more than 1X any one person brings is “impossible and pointless”
- Silicon Valley culture tends to exacerbate the “kind of narcissists that think of themselves as 10 times better”
- The industry was much different back then and had different tools
- Professional skills are still undervalued compared to algorithmic or technical skills
What Fear in Leadership Looks Like (via The Software Mentor)
- Lack of vision, or refusal to make the vision clear to the team
- Lack of transparency, things are unnecessarily complicated
- Talking at the team instead of with them
- Not setting out values of standards of behavior
- Blaming failures or lack of progress on external forces
- Makes the team take the blame
Ideas for Helping Remote Colleagues Bond (via Harvard Business Review)
- Structure some conversation around shared content (e.g., book club, discussing a TED talk)
- Use online games to build trust, especially where people can fail together
Leadership
4 Questions You Should Always Ask That Will Tell You Who Your Best Employees Are (via The Watercooler)
- What happens when you delegate to them? (gets it done / needs guidance / worried it won’t get done)
- What happens when you recruit? (find people like them / find someone better / find someone very different)
- What happens when they need to do something new? (teach themselves / you have to guide them / you have to hand-hold and that may not even work)
- What happens when they are blocked? (ask for help / try to figure it out and don’t admit they’re struggling / rarely ask for help and things slip)
Research Explores How “Fresh Starts” Affect Our Motivation at Work (via Harvard Business Review)
The author presents two studies where he observed similar results. If you give people a fresh start by resetting the metrics you use to track them (e.g., past performance, sales numbers for the quarter), you get different outcomes. If an individual wasn’t performing well, the fresh start motivated them to work harder, as their past performance was wiped clean. Conversely, if an individual was doing well, erasing all of those gains was demotivating.
The 3 Elements of Trust (via Harvard Business Review)
- Positive relationships — knowing people’s issues, balancing results with concerns, helping people cooperate, resolving conflict, giving honest feedback
- Good judgment/expertise — making good decisions, trusting others, being a source of information, contributing to results, anticipates and responds to problems
- Consistency — serves as role model, walks the walk, keeps promises, follows through, does what it takes to get things done
How Leaders Can Open Up to Their Teams Without Oversharing (via Harvard Business Review)
“If a leader never shows emotion, that conviction only becomes stronger. But when a leader reveals a more personal side to herself, and we sense that it is authentic, we feel a connection and are more likely to believe her words.” Some suggestions…
- Figure yourself out — what’s behind an emotion you’re feeling?
- Regulate your emotions — being angry at people doesn’t help
- Address your feelings without becoming emotionally leaky — tell your team if you’re having a bad day, and that it’s not their fault
- Provide a path forward — what are you going to do now?
- Avoid oversharing — how would you feel if your manager shared what you’re considering sharing?
- Read the room — if everyone’s feeling anxious (and you are as well), you can benefit from sympathizing with them
HBR Guide to Coaching Employees (via Cameron Presley)
Despite being an HBR fan, I haven’t read any of their guidebooks. Wherever you are on the management chain — junior or senior — these 15 essays cover the ins and outs of coaching as a leadership exercise from many angles. (Bonus: It’s fairly brief and segmented, so it’s not time-consuming.) A few nuggets I wrote down: Coaching is all about asking questions (Socratic method), not fixing things; resist the urge to answer questions immediately. The essay “Coaching Your Rookie Managers” hit home with me, so I’ll definitely reread that in the future to see if I’m making progress.
Process
How to become more productive while working less (via The Software Mentor)
This is something I struggle with, as I believe I have too many types of tasks I do. “Productivity is about managing your time and energy.” Are you doing your best work at the right time? Are you focused when you work? Are you happy with what you’re spending your time on? Are you resting and recharging?
How to Ask Your Boss for an Unpaid Leave to Travel, Study, or Spend Time with Family (via Harvard Business Review)
- Do: keep in mind just because others haven’t been granted leave doesn’t mean you won’t; think about what you want to achieve in the time off and how it will benefit the company; plan your time off to minimize impact on your coworkers
- Don’t: wing it — know what you want, anticipate reactions; ignore potential objections; assume the decision is yes/no
Why You Should Work Less and Spend More Time on Hobbies (via Harvard Business Review)
I needed this article this week; I haven’t worked on my scale model plane in over a month! Focusing on a hobby helps with creativity, perspective, and builds confidence. My challenge is finding the energy, not just the time.
Understanding Complexity (via Software Lead Weekly)
Most of management theory from the 20th century is about blueprints, flow-charts, command-and-control, efficiency, consistency — “making the unknown known, and then optimizing the hell out of it.” Today’s systems are inherently unknowable. The article describes the Cynefin framework…
- Obvious — known knowns, cause and effect is clear; example: loan approvals
- Complicated — known unknowns; cause and effect requires analysis or expertise, as there are many right answers; example: chess
- Complex — unknown unknowns; cause and effect are deduced after the fact, and there are no right answers; examples: battlefields, corporate culture
- Chaotic — cause and effect are unclear; example: riot
Technology
Infrastructure from Code: The Big Picture (via Understanding DevOps skill path)
This course gives an overview of the source/build/test/release pipeline and describes the benefits of automating each of the stages. The audience is primarily for IT/ops to help them understand how to manage change in a DevOps landscape.
Test Automation: The Big Picture (via Understanding DevOps skill path)
If you are new to testing, especially any kind of automated testing, this brief course covers the most common topics, presents the business case for how testing will help you, and gives you some techniques for getting started.