Business
Three Ways to Be a More Effective Fundraiser (via TED)
The entire video is full of tips on how to fund what’s important to you, and helping to reframe the conversations and your role in them.
- Understand your feelings (i.e., baggage) about money
- Build relationships by getting to know them
- Be effective in asking for what you want
Communication
Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration (via Harvard Business Review)
- Teach people to listen, not talk. Ask expansive (i.e., not yes/no) questions. Focus on the listener, not yourself. Engage in self-checks. Be comfortable with silence.
- Train people to practice empathy. Empathy is more important than sharing your opinions. Look for the unspoken.
- Make people more comfortable with feedback. Discuss feedback aversion openly. Make feedback about others’ behavior direct, specific, and applicable. Give feedback on feedback. Use “yes and” instead of “yes but”.
- Teach people to lead and follow. Increase self-awareness. Delegate your power.
- Speak with clarity and avoid abstractions.
- Train people to have win-win interactions.
The Truth About Open Offices (via Harvard Business Review)
- We have many different ways to communicate, yet people don’t necessarily interact in more productive ways.
- The authors used sensors to determine before/after behavior of switching from cubicles to open offices. They found face-to-face interactions dropped 70% and electronic communication increased to compensate.
- You need to be physically near people to increase the likelihood of interactions — ideally on the same floor in the same building.
- Regarding configurable offices, “If you are going to let people choose the spaces that best meet their individual needs, your workers may as well be remote.”
- Be specific about what you aim to improve. For example, if uninterrupted time to focus is best, increasing opportunities for collaboration isn’t helpful.
- A Japanese firm changed to free-address seating (i.e., no department areas, sit where you want). They found people did collaborate more and spent less time in meetings because they solved their own problems. However, the managers were left out of the loop and quality/oversight suffered leading to customer complaints.
- There are small tweaks you can make to your office to improve what needs improving. Experiment, keep what works, toss out what doesn’t.
Leadership
3 Ways to Kick Your Micromanaging Habit for Good (via Harvard Business Review)
- Stop checking in all the time; make the information come to you
- Trust your team’s experts; they have a job for a reason
- Delegate more than you may be comfortable with
Training Engineering Managers (via Tamas Torok)
This post covers the gamut of what engineering management is, how people get trained, where things typically go south, and other such topics.
One on One Meeting Opening Lines (via Software Lead Weekly)
The most important one is “What do you want to talk about?” It puts the focus on them and what’s top of mind. After all, 1:1s should not be status meetings to help you understand what they’re doing.
The Leader as Coach (via Harvard Business Review)
- 21st century managers can’t have all the answers; companies are moving from command-and-control to coaching (support and guidance instead of instructions).
- Most managers are not at good at coaching as they think; they have to cede their primary tool: asserting their authority.
- Styles of coaching
- Directive — mentorship; coach shares knowledge
- Laissez-faire — people are doing well on their own
- Nondirective — ask questions, withhold judgment, try to get people to solve problems on their own
- Situational [ideal] — balance of nondirective and directive
- Basic steps… assess the situation for what style to use, listen, ask open-ended questions, practice nondirective coaching
- GROW
- Goal — what do both parties want to get out of the situation?
- Reality — raise the right questions (who, what, when, where)
- Options — think more broadly (e.g., if you had a magic wand, what would you do?)
- Will — what will you do next?
- For organizations to adopt this mindset, it needs to start from the top with good modeled behavior
Process
How to Overcome Your (Checks Email) Distraction Habit (via Harvard Business Review)
We don’t need time management; we need attention management.
- Keep a journal of when your attention is interrupted and why
- Come up with a plan to mitigate those interruptions
- “Activation energy” — make it easier to pay more attention
- “Friction” — make it harder for your attention to break
Stress
Tackling Leadership Struggles, Burnout, and Performance Anxiety (via Harvard Business Review)
- Burnout has more to do with anxiety than workload (we know we have it and can’t manage it, or don’t know about it).
- Leadership anxiety is chronic; we want to be liked.
- Anxiety shows up when we don’t get what we believe we need.
- We have “idols” — efficiency, people pleasing, perfectionism. What controls you?
- Over-functioning leaders — taking on more work that should be done by others; “It’s quicker if I do it”, “I never learn anything in these meetings because I’m the smartest in the room.”
- In the past several decades, we’ve lost the ability to listen to people we disagree with and maintain connection with them.
- 93% of what we say isn’t about the words. Lean back and take up more space when projecting power; lean in and cede power when forming new relationships.
Technology
How I’m Using Biological Data to Tell Better Stories and Spark Social Change (via TED)
The researcher in this talk is capturing physiological responses to certain types of media combined with machine learning to tailor media to individuals. Although she’s open-sourced the Limbic Project, there’s an ethical concern over how the data could be used by big governments and profit-seeking companies.
Digital Tools I Wish Existed (via Software Lead Weekly)
Managing our digital life is difficult. I like this author’s ideas of potential ideas to improve (even if they’re not practical).
- A way to manage inbound digital content (things to read)
- A universal book log, recommendation, and sharing system
- Intelligent PDF viewers, eBook readers, audiobook & podcast players
- A centralized search interface for my digital brain