Professional Development – 2023 – Week 10

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/54585499@N04/

.NET

The Awesome New Queue of .NET 6 That You Skipped (via Nick Chapsas)

There’s a PriorityQueue<T, TPriority> type now. The caveat is that you cannot guarantee order within a given priority; only that things are dequeued correctly for their priority. Perhaps Microsoft did this for performance reasons? To ger around this, you can introduce a timestamp as part of a tuple: PriorityQueue<string, (int, long)>. If you use enums to represent priority, remember they’re backed by ints (i.e., the order you define them matters unless you assign each enum a value). However, what happens if you need to add a new priority that’s higher than your highest enum? You can make your own singleton comparer and pass that into the PriorityQueue constructor.

Leadership

How to Help Superstar Employees Fulfill Their Potential (via HBR)

(1) Measure high potentials against specific competencies to help expand their leadership style, (2) help high potentials increase their emotional intelligence, and (3) encourage a learning mindset.

How Leaders Can Get the Feedback They Need to Grow (via HBR)

  • Embrace feeling negative emotions often
  • Have a go-to question
  • Embrace the other person’s discomfort.
  • Listen to understand, not to respond.
  • Close the loop: Make your listening tangible.
  • Make giving feedback — not venting — a team habit.

Managing yourself

When — and How — to Keep a Poker Face at Work (via HBR)

For us emotional/sensitive types who normally bring positive traits (revive morale, inspire trust, etc.), there are times when we need to keep emotions in check, especially in tense situations. This article offers some concrete steps to recognize and manage things.

How to be a team player — without burning out (via TED)

Some triggers for saying yes to too many things: (1) the desire to help others, (2) the need for accomplishment, and (3) fear (of missing out, fear of losing control, fear of what others might say).

Persuasion

3 Rhetorical Techniques to Increase Your Impact (via HBR)

  • “Almost everything we do involves words. From emails and power points to phone calls and pitch meetings, words are how we persuade, communicate, and connect.”
  • Turn actions into identities (e.g., “be a voter” instead of “go vote”).
  • Speak with certainty (i.e., hedge less by avoiding things like “think”, “might”, “seems to me”).
  • The word “you” grabs the reader’s attention as if you’re speaking directly to them. However, avoid second person in documentation as it can be interpreted as blame (e.g., “if you can’t get the printer to work”).