7 min read

đź•ą Influence, Communities of Practice, Resigning, Uncertainty, Learning Culture, DevEx, Platforms, Active Listening: TMW #335

Hello there!

A huge, huge thank you to everyone who pre-registered for the Campus Alpha Launch - we're very nearly ready, and we'll be reaching out to each of you to get you enrolled and start gathering your feedback in the next few weeks.

Something new that we're adding to Campus is a library of CTO Stories, very quick insights from successful technology leaders about a lesson they've learned and a mistake they've made:

The plan is to keep adding to the library of Stories - if you have a lesson or a mistake you'd like to talk about, drop us a line!

The next major step in the implementation of Campus is the creation of some courses. We have a handful of subject areas in mind, including Building Executive Presence, Budget Management and Vendor Management, but we'd really like to hear from you - what topics would you like to see us create courses around? Drop me a reply with your ideas!

Pre-register for the Campus Alpha Launch here

On Friday, I'll be hosting a town hall Q&A on Slack, which will cover Campus progress, events, the community itself and more. If you're a Slack member (and if not, why not?) please do jump in and ask me some questions!

See you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes - Slack Q&A with Andy Skipper
Join us for our first ever Slack Q&A with CTO Craft CEO, Andy Skipper! Here’s your chance to be part of the conversation.
Don’t wait! Be prepared for the tech talent shortage and economic headwinds | CTO Craft
Despite layoffs in the tech sector, organisations struggle to hire tech talent. The question is, how do you overcome the challenges?

Reads of the Week

Questionable Advice: “How can I drive change and influence teams…without power?”
Last month I got to attend GOTO Chicago and give a talk about continuous deployment and high-performing teams. Honestly I did a terrible job, and I’m not being modest. I had just rolled off a…
Community of Practice explained | Management 3.0
What is a Community of Practice and how does it work? CoP explained by Management 3.0 Community Builder Sara.

From our Sponsors

[From Vention] Lessons learned from a seasoned CTO

Vention’s CTO of Digital Solutions shares how to fuse what already works with new approaches and technology, plus how to make the most of DevOps.

Read the Post

Thanks as always to all the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, Vention, Jellyfish, LinearB, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

How To Avoid Fire-Drill Leadership To Build Your Leadership Effectiveness – Scott Cochrane
Leaders Tackle Challenges Early
They are responsible for proactively monitoring the early-warning risk radar… and avoiding the impacts from when a risk becomes a crisis.
Quitting as a manager: how to resign from a management role
Knowing when to resign from a leadership position is a difficult question. Knowing how to resign from a management position is even harder. We’ll show you how.
Treating uncertainty as a first-class concern
One of the things that complex incidents have in common is the uncertainty that the responders experience while the incident is happening. Something is clearly wrong, that’s why an incident i…

Culture, People & Teams

Teamwork Stopped Working When A New Colleague Joined
Communication and feedback help teams work better.
Build a Strong Learning Culture on Your Team
With the nature of work changing so rapidly, it’s no longer enough just to offer employees opportunities for upskilling and reskilling. Companies also need to help workers become “expert learners” — and a key way of doing that, the learning-and-development expert James McKenna writes, is to follow t…
How To Get Buy-in for DevEx Initiatives: Strategies From GitHub, Notion, and More
Opportunities to improve DevEx may seem obvious, yet getting executive buy-in can be difficult. Here, leaders at GitHub, Notion, and Etsy describe how to successfully get buy-in.
How can you make feedback conversations less painful?
Many of us dread feedback conversations. Whether we’re giving feedback or receiving feedback, just the idea of the discussion creates…
The Surprising Benefits Of Conflict In The Workplace | David Burkus
In this article, we will explore four surprising benefits of conflict in the workplace. And we’ll discuss how leaders can create a safe space for sharing diverse perspectives and model respectful debate to leverage the benefits of conflict.

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Coaching in Times of Deep Organizational Change · Illustrated Agile
When an organization makes an announcement that they are letting people go, how should an organizational change coach respond?
My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects
208. Ultimate Guide to Platforms
Patterns and Practices in the Creation, Rise, and Fall of Platforms
How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout
Ensuring that Intercom has great uptime requires a rapid response when things go wrong. This is how we developed an effective, sustainable on-call engineering process.

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Personal Development Made Practical — The Busy Leader’s Guide to Carving Out Time and Knowing Where to Start
Building better teams and companies starts with working on yourself. But for startup leaders, making time for personal development is usually last on the list. Here’s a collection of tactical tips from the Review archives for getting started.
Become a better facilitator with 5 tips for improving your active listening skills
The ability to be an active listener is pretty much a non-negotiable for facilitators, but that doesn’t mean the skill comes naturally to…
Insights Into Stress Anxiety And Depression For Team Leaders
Stress, anxiety and depression are complex mental health conditions that can have significant impacts on individuals’ lives
Workplace stress is killing us. Here’s what to do about it.
Within a year and a half of starting my first job, I had burned out. It was a crisis of self-care, as much as anything: I’d been working…

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy