🥝 Dunbar, Building Trust, Exit Interviews, Team Metrics, Compassion, Kindness, Story Points: TMW #261 by CTO Craft
Hello again! Hope you had a restful weekend
CTO Craft Creative Committee member and Leadership Coach Laura Tacho has put together an amazing 3-day course for leaders looking to make their feedback more impactful - and she's kindly provided a discount code for CTO Craft members and TMW subscribers.
In Laura's own words: "Give better feedback to your dev teams in just 3 days. In this live course, you'll learn how to give difficult feedback without damaging relationships. You'll choose the right feedback approach for any situation, and get practice using real-life scenarios. This isn't a generic leadership course that doesn't understand the complexities of being an engineering leader -- this course was made for CTOs, VPs, engineering managers, and senior ICs."
The course runs May 23-26, 14:00-15:00 BST. Use code CTOCRAFT for 300€ off the course fee - that's 25%! You can see some more about the course at bit.ly/eng-feedback-course
That's it, on with the links!
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
RESCHEDULED: How Design Thinking can solve your challenges: Fri 8 Apr at 12:30 GMT
For quite some time, design thinking has been perceived as a magic methodology to set yourself apart from competitors by focusing on your customer’s needs. Yet, innovation labs come and go – building in-house teams to focus on the future alongside running the day-to-day business has proven to be challenging.
Reads of the Week
Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas
150, Dunbar’s number, is the natural size of human social groups. Robin Dunbar’s 1993 paper, where he put forward this hypothesis, is a great read – it’s got twists and turns, so much more in it than just the 150 number.
Early Security for Startups
I once read blogging advice: if someone asks you something, write it as a blog post and soon you will have a blog. One advice I am often asked is “I am a new startup; how should I approach security?” Here goes my attempt, based on my experience working at and advising hypergrowth companies.
Top Methods for Building Trust in Virtual Teams
Building trust is a challenge for any leader in any position. Building trust in virtual teams is even more difficult.
From our Partners
AWS Community Networking Event - Sponsored by Steamhaus
What better way to end a great day of everything AWS for you and your team than to catch up with friends and peers from across the community? Enjoy a free drink or two with some tapas, take part in the AWS Community Mastermind pub quiz, and potentially win one of several sponsor prize draws! 5pm on 27th April
About our Partners
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Culture & People
The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale
People use the word "stress" to describe a wide variety of situations – from your cell phone ringing while you're talking on another phone – to the feelings associated with intense work overload, or the death of a loved-one.
Your last one-on-one: what to do instead of an exit interview
So say you agree with me that exit interviews are dangerous for employees, but you’re a kind, empathetic manager who’s built a team with high trust. You’d never dream of retaliation, are open to feedback – even if it’s harsh. You don’t want to put your departing direct in an uncomfortable or threatening position, but you’d like to know what they have to say! What then?
Team Metrics in Depth
Teams that are “developing” an understanding of the value of Team Metrics and adopting the foundational techniques should focus on the following improvements The What: The team tracks Metrics The How: The first step in developing foundation techniques of Team metrics, is simply tracking metric
Can Do vs. Should Do
Is your team focusing on what it should do? Or what it can do?
Many teams struggle with this deceptively simple question.
The Rise of the Triple Peak Day
Findings from Microsoft and its researchers suggest that the 9-to-5 workday is fading in an age of remote and hybrid work and more flexible hours. That pattern was first spotted early in the pandemic, when Microsoft Teams chats outside the typical workday increased more than in any other time segment, particularly between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Leadership & Self-management
The Tactical Guide to Making Better Decisions When Starting and Scaling Companies
The First Round team has been lucky to work with retired poker player and decision-making expert Annie Duke in a special capacity these past few years. Here, we open-source some of the advice she gives to help founders face down uncertainty and make better decisions.
Managers Are Trapped in a Performance-Compassion Dilemma
Based on the reaction to our earlier article on the competing demands for both compassion and results leaders are facing, and given our ongoing work and research at companies around the world, we’ve learned that middle managers are often the ones feeling that tension most acutely.
Dimensions of Power
“Well I’m a senior engineer so we’ll do it my way.” I always hated conversations like that as a junior engineer but they seem to be a natural consequence of titles. Keep titles private and the best ideas will win instead of the best titles. Right? 😬
You Want To Be Kind, But Is Your Leadership Really Demonstrating Kindness?
“The kindest form of leadership is the truth.” – Jack Welch The problem many leaders have with the concept of kindness is that they think it means to avoid speaking truth, in order to spare someone’s feelings.
Agile, Engineering & Product
What is Data Science/Problem Fit And Why You Need It
I always felt that Data Science and Product Management share a lot of research aspects. When developing a new product, you have to work with assumptions, uncertainties, and gradually figure out a path to validate or verify these assumptions.
Story Points: Why is this so hard?
As a long-time member of the agile software community, I’ve had a lot of time to think about how we used to do things and how we’re doing them now.
BBC Online - A year with serverless
Its been a little over a year since I published my last two blog posts, in which I outlined the process we went through to choose the technology for BBC online and the steps we took to optimise serverless for our use.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.com/community
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Have an amazing week!
Andy