Career
What to Do If Your Boss Doesn’t Like You (via Harvard Business Review)
- Trust issues: clarify their expectations (e.g., “How could I add more value to this job?”), create an all-out campaign to enhance your boss’s perception, have frequent check-ins
- Connection issues: observe eye contact and how your boss engages with you compared to others, start engaging conversations about work topics, use open-palm gestures at navel height to convey safety
- Broaden your focus: maybe you have negativity bias, invest in relationships in other places
Communication
If You Learn to Write, You Can Change Your Life. (via Software Lead Weekly)
There are many nuggets in this post about how powerful writing can be (e.g., “To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.”). What’s the purpose of anything you write? Each sentence should compel the reader to read the next one.
Health
How Much Is Bad Sleep Hurting Your Career? (via Harvard Business Review)
“Lack of sleep leads to detriments in job performance, productivity, career progression and satisfaction, and an increase in job-related accidents, absenteeism, and counterproductive work behaviors. Conversely, better sleep has been linked to improved memory and learning. Even short naps have been found to have significant positive effects on work performance. One of the best ways to ensure a productive day at the office is to make sure you’re getting a good night’s sleep.”
Leadership
Our book club discussed the third, fourth, and fifth steps of the cycle of driving results: debate, decide, and persuade.
A New Description for Power (via Harvard Business Review)
- Power is situational (think about the change you want, identify roadblocks and turn them into advantages, go beyond titles and credentials)
- Power is relational (find allies/resisters, elicit people to co-create solutions, realize who depends on you and who you depend on, leverage relationships among others, be smart about trade-offs)
- Power is dynamic (pause/reflect/pivot, use experiments, give resisters time to warm to your ideas
- Influence is about compliance (formal instruments, guidelines, policies)
- Influence is about identification (belief in a leader through vision, goals, outcomes)
- Influence is about internalization (norms, cultures, beliefs)
Remote Managers Are Having Trust Issues (via Harvard Business Review)
“Research conducted during Covid-19 shows that a large number of managers are struggling with the effective management of people working from home, with this translating into many workers feeling untrusted and micromanaged by their bosses.”
- Start at the highest level possible; managers are less likely to act differently than their own leaders
- Provide practical and moral support for remote working in the org
- Educate managers about the potential benefits of remote working when it’s designed well
- Train managers to develop job autonomy; check in rather than check up
- Train managers in how to manage by results
Productivity
You Need More Sleep. What Should You Do If You Can’t Get It? (via Harvard Business Review)
- Caffeine is a common remedy, but this can cause more sleep issues by interfering with healthy sleep patterns
- Know when to call it a day; working while sleep deprived leads to cognitive impairment (translation: lower quality work, more mistakes)
- Find which tasks you can accomplish without as much mental focus (i.e., “I could do that in my sleep”)
- Rely on others when you are flagging
The epistemology of software quality (via Cameron Presley)
“No method, tool, or language matters nearly as much as our own minds.” We’re humans first, technologists second. If we focused more on sleep, stress, and hours worked, we’d be better off than arguing about which programming language is the most productive.