🍌 Self-managed Teams, Futurespectives, Fire-Drill Leadership, Burnout, Testing, Liberating Structures: TMW #227 by CTO Craft
Hello there, welcome to the week!
We have two new CTO interviews on the CTO Craft blog this week, with Jonathan Lister Parsons of the recently IPOd PensionBee, and Ellen Candil of commercial real estate manager CBRE Global Workplace Solutions. Take a look to read about the steps they took in their journeys to leadership roles, the mistakes they made and the lessons they learned.
Just a reminder that our first Successful 1:1s and Giving Feedback workshop takes place on August 23rd - there are only a few spots left, so if you're interested in getting involved, please take a look, and remember to use "indeedSEVERALwind" to take £100 off the attendance price: Book your place here
Until next time!
Andy @ CTO Craft
From the CTO Craft Blog
From Zero to CTO - Jonathan Lister Parsons is in the Spotlight
PensionBee Co-founder Jonathan Lister Parsons talks empowering teams, prioritising mental health and his vision for the future of technology.
From Zero to CTO - Ellen Candil is in the spotlight
Ellen Candil talks about her career journey from Brazil to London, being a woman leader in tech and her mission to open doors for others.
CTO Craft Labs
Successful 1:1s & Giving Feedback with Dan Smith - August 23rd
The 1:1 meeting is the best way for managers and those who report to them to connect on pressing issues, develop a strong relationship, and ensure that employees feel like they are working towards their personal, team and company goals.
Putting in place a proper framework, agenda, tone, asking the right questions, the setting of goals makes the 1:1 meeting motivational, impactful and aligns you and your team in achieving your mutual aspirations.
Remember to use the code "indeedSEVERALwind" for £100 off the ticket price
Read of the Week
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021
The questions we ask in our annual survey will help us improve the Stack Overflow community and the platform that serves them. This year, for example, we observed a significant evolution in the way developers educate themselves.
About our Partners
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Culture & People
Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games
Building self-managed teams sounds way too optimistic to be a viable strategy. Or does it?
Better coordination, or better software?
TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.
Giving feedback is giving gifts
Have you ever received feedback that has shocked and surprised you? Has anyone told you you’re not doing something right in a manner that was upsetting and conflicting? Chances are it was not you, it was them.
A simple and effective futurospective sequence
Below is a sequence of activities for a one-hour meeting for a small group of people that wanted to take look at the past (a retro perspective) and plan for the future (a future perspective). I have used a few activities from FunRetrospectives.com.
Leadership & Self-management
Focus on Effectiveness, Not Efficiency
Many of us focus on how efficient we can be. Many of our organizations want to maximize our output for every minute and hour of work. However, if we focus on effectiveness first, we create better outcomes for everyone. We don't waste time working on things that don't matter.
How Avoiding Fire-Drill Leadership Can Build Your Leadership Effectiveness
Like Don't move Unlike 0If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. The truth of this leadership axiom is lost on many leaders who seem to lurch their leadership, and their team, from one panic-riddled crisis to another. I was once on a team led by such a leader.
Three Burnouts Later, I Finally Figured it Out
My first brush with burnout was cataclysmic. I did not understand what I was doing to myself and continued to push myself until I broke. Once the dust settled, I wrote about that experience in an article titled, The lies and lack of self-respect that lead to burnout.
Calculating Leader Leverage
My partner Chris Moody recently sent around a note on a concept he refers to as Leader Leverage. I encourage every CEO to read and consider it. His rant follows. Many of you are probably tired of hearing me rant about some form of what I often refer to as “leader leverage”.
Agile, Engineering & Product
We need to talk about testing
Or how programmers and testers can work together for a happy and fulfilling life. Why don’t we just automate all the testing? Is test coverage a useful metric? What does it mean to “shift testing left”? When and where should we be testing? How much is enough testing?
Why is it so hard to decide to buy?
Build vs buy, the never-ending debate. Should we buy a vendor product, or build the system ourselves? Despite popular consensus that it is critical to focus on work that is core to our business, engineers the world over continue to build non-core products instead of buying them. What gives?
How to Use Liberating Structures for a Retrospective
In the world of innovation, retrospective meetings are an essential component of a project lifecycle. They’re the crucial debrief or “look back” at the work that took place during an agile project to evaluate effectiveness and gather feedback on how to improve and mitigate risk moving forward.
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:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy