Business
The High Cost of Poor Succession Planning (via HBR)
“Why are some of the world’s biggest and most powerful organizations getting CEO appointments so wrong? For five main reasons: lack of attention to succession, poor leadership development, suboptimal board composition, lazy hiring practices, and conflicted search firms. Here are some recommendations for fixing those problems.”
How to Successfully Scale a Flat Organization (via HBR)
- Organic modular design — a collection of tribes with high degrees of autonomy
- Coordination through enabling mechanisms — have decision frameworks that are org-wide, understandable/usable by everyone
- Transparency — trust, equality, and fairness can’t exist well without transparency
- Using AI to enhance knowledge sharing — one company made a map of “who knows what” to help people navigate complexity
- Agile learning — challenge the status quo, experiment, be willing to fail so long as you learn something useful
- Promotion of a living story — shared identity with stories that promote the new cultures that develop
Career
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding (via Software Lead Weekly)
I found the author’s book The Manager’s Path helpful, and this list of 23 skills is a solid one.
Communication
How to Get Your Team to Stop Asking You Every Little Question (via HBR)
“Do your employees bring you every little “speed bump” in their day? Here are four strategies for minimizing these interruptions and empowering employees to make their own decisions: 1) Put an emphasis on attention management. Start by identifying whether an “open-door policy” is something that is stated or promoted in your organization. If so, make it explicit with a clear definition. An open-door policy was never intended to mean that anyone is available to be interrupted at any time for any reason. 2) Promote self-confidence in your staff. Set boundaries for your employees, making sure they understand the responsibilities of their role, the types of decisions they can and should make on their own, and the general limits of their authority. 3) Embrace the tough decisions. If there are employees whose judgment you don’t trust, try to understand why, so you can find remedies. 4) Emphasize the idea that mistakes are opportunities to learn. Hold team members accountable to their decisions by using mistakes as teaching opportunities.”
Culture
You Can’t Cure Your Employee’s Existential Crisis. But You Can Help. (via HBR)
- Look beyond salary — sometimes money isn’t everything (e.g., flex time, WFH, org purpose); create healthy boundaries between work and personal time
- Make the work more meaningful — job descriptions/duties should tie directly to the mission; let people participate in writing their job descriptions; leadership should tie the org’s work to the broader goal (community, world)
- Foster strong working relationships — loneliness is more common among younger workers; WFH solves some problems (commute, relocation) but causes others (disconnection); leaders should find ways to help remote folks integrate (team building, mentorship, virtual “water coolers”)
Employees are Lonelier Than Ever. Here’s How Employers Can Help (via HBR)
- “Few people truly know me or would support me in my time of need. The lonely feel only superficially connected to others, perhaps cordial but not truly collegial.”
- “…historically focused on learning-oriented behaviors like asking questions, raising concerns, admitting mistakes, and offering ideas. Employees are unlikely to speak up in these ways unless they receive strong signals from leaders and teammates that they’ll receive positive reinforcement for doing so.”
- “…sometimes people have to be forced to interact in more open, emotional, and personal ways to forge true relationships at work. If we wait until these conversations feel comfortable and normal, they may never happen.”
- “…the newfound levels of team bonding slipped away unless leadership made additional changes to structures and reward systems.”
- “Instead, design the work for high levels of interactivity and the regular exchange of resources and thought partnership.”
- “Companies need to increase the benefits as well as reduce the risks associated with reaching out to others at work. This means noticing and rewarding people for making the first move as well as for responding supportively to others’ outreach.”
Research: How Cultural Differences Can Impact Global Teams (via HBR)
“Personal diversity includes differences in easily observable personal characteristics such as age, gender, language, skills, and values. In contrast, contextual diversity refers to differences in the environments that the team members live in, such as the different levels of economic development and different types of institutions and political systems of their countries.” Personal diversity gets in the way (less cohesion). Contextual diversity is helpful in creative contexts where having a variety of backgrounds prevents group-think.
Leadership
Build Your Reputation as a Trustworthy Leader (via HBR)
- Be who you say you are — embody your stated values, acknowledge gaps where you say one thing and do another
- Treat others and their work with dignity — create opportunities for others to shine, be a safe place to fail
- Balance transparency with discretion — set and keep information boundaries, offer and invite dissent and feedback
- Build bridges that unify — turn rivals into accomplices, be fascinated by others to create belonging