🥯 Teal Orgs, Prioritisation, Career Maps, Resignations, JD-R, Handling Crises, OKRs in Agile: TMW #210 by CTO Craft
Howdy!
In this week's CTO Craft Bytes event on Friday, Ezechi Britton of Impact X and Michael Olatokun of Skillstruct will be in conversation about creating a culture that's inclusive to a diverse talent pool. They'll be bringing some real-world experience and will discuss practical ways to attract and retain talent at all seniority levels.
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - How to Recruit and Retain Diverse Talent - Fri April 16th, 12:30 GMT
See you next time!
Andy @ CTO Craft
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Reads of the Week
Teal Organization: Do You Have What it Takes?
What is a Teal organization and why should we care? Frederic Laloux wrote a powerful book called “Reinventing Organizations,” where he went through 10 different case studies of high-performance organizations.
Prioritization Beyond Algorithms
The problem of prioritization comes up in many of my coaching discussions with product leaders, and in almost every product forum. We want it to be a trivial mechanical process: pick a metric (usually current revenue), estimate ROI for the entire backlog, then do whatever scores highest. But that very rarely works in practice. Prioritization fits into a larger strategic and organizational framework
Transparent career maps: How we did it and what we learned
At Wise one of our core product values is transparency. Our mission is to remove the hidden fees that often get applied when you send money across borders to different currencies – so advocating for transparency and building into our product is a top priority.
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Culture & People
“I Quit!” How to Tactfully Handle Employee Resignations
“Hi! Do you have a moment? I need to talk to you.” And there you have it. Your employee just quit. Now what? It’s terrible timing. You have that massive project coming up. You’re not sure when you’re going to have time to fit in interviews, onboarding, and training.
Psychological Safety At Work: what do psychologically safe work teams look like?
Do people feel comfortable in team meetings asking about things they do not know or they do not understand, or do they generally try to maintain an image of perfect knowledge about work matters?
Do people feel comfortable in team meetings raising difficult issues, concerns and reservations about specific pieces of work, about ‘how things are done here’ or about how well the team works together or do these conversations take place informally outside team meetings?
Navigating engineering performance reviews: part two
‘But I thought I was getting promoted this cycle. Getting a “meets expectations” is a surprise, and honestly, a disappointment.’ This is what one of my first direct reports said to me about a decade ago. Since then, I’ve learned a lot and made performance feedback a cornerstone of my approach to building and leading high-performing teams.
Why You Should Pair with Non-Engineers
TL;DR Spotify encourages engineers to become T-shaped and lean into technologies and skill sets outside of their core specialization. Being a T-shaped developer doesn’t always mean having to learn more code, additional languages, or frameworks.
Leadership & Self-management
How to Establish Working Relationships as a New Leader in a Remote Team
If you’re new to an organization, the tone you set early on with your team can make a huge difference in whether you’re ultimately successful as a leader.
Job Demands-Resources Model
This article provides a practical explanation of the Job Demands-Resources Model or JD-R model for work engagement. After reading, you’ll have a basic understanding of this powerful management tool.
Manage a Crisis Without Freaking Out
Crises like these are enough to make anyone freak out, but if you are able to lead your team through them you will all come out stronger and more resilient. Follow these steps to manage the crisis without losing your head.
The two types of trust you need to build with your team (and three ways to go about it)
Everything good that happens between people at work comes down to one thing – trust. Yet the more I work with leadership teams, and the deeper I dive into leadership research, the more convinced I’m becoming that we often overlook this vital foundation.
Agile, Engineering & Product
How we improved deployment velocity at Cronofy
In Q1 2021 I set the goal of increasing the deployment velocity of the Cronofy engineering team. We were already deploying several times per week, often multiple times per day putting us in the top percentile of teams, but I felt we could do better to delivery value more consistently to the business.
Everyone Is Still Terrible At Creating Software At Scale
There is something peculiar about software that makes it different from other crafts. A long while ago, I read “The Mythical Man-Month” by Frederick Brooks and I think he called it accidental complexity.
OKRs in Agile infrographic
Andy says: "The title speaks for itself!"
Improve How Your Scrum Team Uses Metrics
Every Scrum Team understands the value of metrics, but so many of them also struggle to use them effectively. This ties into our own experience with Scrum Teams as well.
What Else?
FBI arrests man for plan to kill 70% of Internet in AWS bomb attack
The FBI arrested a Texas man on Thursday for allegedly planning to kill 70% of the internet in a bomb attack targeting an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center on Smith Switch Road in Ashburn, Virginia.
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