🍉 Loneliness in Tech, Conflict, Exit Interviews, Compensation, Stable Teams, Working with EAs, A11y: TMW #266 by CTO Craft
Hello again!
Only two weeks to go until we open the doors on the CTO Craft MiniCon on Hiring Engineers on May 31st - the line-up and agenda are now complete, and we're really excited to welcome you all. Tickets are still available and it's free to join - you'll be joining over 1,000 other technology leaders who are feeling the impact of the new difficulty in finding and securing good engineers. Don't miss it!
CTO Craft MiniCon 2022 - The Hiring Arc
In the line up is our friend, Luca Rossi, creator of the brilliant Refactoring newsletter. We sat down with Luca last week to get his views on hiring, job posts and much more - you can see his interview below.
That's it, on with the links!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Spotlight Q&A with Founder of Refactoring, Luca Rossi
Luca Rossi is the Founder of Refactoring, a newsletter and community that helps managers, founders, and engineers build better engineering teams. Luca discusses how to create a job post to attract the right talent.
CTO Craft MiniCon - The Complete Engineer Hiring Arc in 3 Hours
Demand from start-ups through to corporates is outstripping supply and pushing wage inflation and candidate rejections. Join us on May 31st for 3 hours of in-depth insights from some of the world’s leading experts in Hiring Engineers, and learn how they’ve sustained successful team growth through COVID and the Great Rethink.
From the CTO Craft Blog
Why Loneliness in Technology is a Serious Matter and How to Support Tech Leaders
The theme of Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 is loneliness. Amber O’Brien is the founder of Headworks, a mental health at work training and consulting company. Amber talks about loneliness, how it affects technology leaders and how we can help ourselves and others.
From our Partners
The role of the CTO at EasyVista – from Pentalog
Join Pentalog for this 50 min CTO talk, with Michael Cohen, a serial CTO who’s done it all.
Find out how a celebrated CIO award recipient and recognized digital transformation leader views the CTO role, his ideas on leadership and technology strategy.
Reads of the Week
The Rubber Band Theory: Navigating Organizational Conflict
Embracing good conflict can lead to better results & stronger teams. Learn how to operationalize good conflict in your company with the Rubber Band Theory!
Exit Interviews: 10 questions you should be asking
The so-called ‘Great Resignation’ is showing no sign of slowing down. Recent data suggests that the number of employees resigning here in the UK are at their highest rate since 2009, with “historically elevated levels of workers leaving the labour market entirely”.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!
AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, Steamhaus, Swarmia
🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝
Culture & People
What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
Today we’re going to do a whirlwind tour of compensation. Hopefully you’ll learn a bit along the way. And I’ll share an exercise for managers, called a compensation review. Some companies use structured pay. Structured pay is pay determined by a formula.
Stakeholder Trust
Like it or not, your team doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Agile can seem strange and different at first. “Are they really working?” outsiders wonder. “It’s noisy and confusing. I don’t want to work that way. If it succeeds, will they force me to do it, too?”
2022: The Death of Company Culture?
But, although company culture is considered vital by industry leaders, influencers and commentators, what does it really mean to the average employee? Our comprehensive report is essential reading for any business looking to improve engagement with its own workforce.
Facilitating team decision-making: How can we decide effectively as a team?
Have you ever wondered how many decisions we make in a day? Various sources indicate that we make around 35,000 decisions per day! With that in mind, I think it’s safe to say that our days are based on decision-making. But, how can we ensure that these decisions are effective?
Stable Teams and Dynamic Structures
If you’ve read my previous posts, you know my fascination with teams, their interactions, and what this means in terms of outcomes.
I recently spoke with Chris Matts on some of the challenges I have been wrestling with and he challenged my thinking around static vs. dynamic structures and organizations.
Leadership & Self-management
Outcome-Focused Decision Making
The more time I spend in leadership roles, the more I reflect on what it takes to make good decisions. I have previously written about strategies for decision making and I am preparing an article on the importance of trade-offss as well. Be clear about the outcome we want to achieve.
Tactical Guide for Working with EAs to Get Better at Delegating
Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, admits he's obsessive about optimizing his time. He shares the ins and outs of how he delegates 400 tasks a month with this ultra-specific guide to working with executive assistants.
Upskilling Managers to Lead Change
If your organization is about to embark on a major change initiative, you know you can’t go it alone: you need change co-pilots and champions at every level of the organization to succeed.
Leadership journal: become an inspiring leader in 10 minutes a day
Have you ever finished a busy workweek, wondering what it was that you’ve accomplished throughout? Me too. I bet you spend time every day racing between numerous tasks on your to-do list. Perhaps you’re rushing between one meeting to the next.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Failing Forward — How We Grow from Incidents
This past year, a few of us who focus on the reliability of Spotify for Artists (S4A) spent some time taking a look at the collection of incidents directly affecting S4A in 2021. We made some hypotheses, and then went to work analyzing each one to build a set of quantitative and qualitative metrics.
A11y Checklist
This checklist uses The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a reference point. The WCAG is a shared standard for web content accessibility for individuals, organizations, and governments.
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
Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:
Have an amazing week!
Andy