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🍌 Team Dynamics, Red Beads, Risk, Chess, Protected Time, Hybrid Work, Code Yellows, Calendar Resets: TMW #410

How would you design the worst company culture?
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This issue of TMW is sponsored by CTO Craft's Mentoring Circles - the fastest way to build confidence and learn from other technology leaders.

Hello again, welcome to the week!

Wow - when the CTO Craft community gets its teeth into a topic, there's no shortage of input and insights.. Last week we asked them to design the worst possible company culture, and dozens of amazing replies came back immediately. Here are some of my top picks - what are yours?

  • Accountability and blame are used interchangeably
  • Middle managers have responsibilities and accountabilities without having any sort of decision-making authority
  • Hero awards for people working overtime to fix critical issues (which they mostly caused themselves)
  • Meetings to set dates and times for meetings
  • Using estimation blackmail to make everyone work evenings and weekends
  • Toxic positivity
  • Not letting go of toxic people because “they are the only one who can rescue us within this weird code base that they single-handedly created that no one else can understand or handle”

With several thousand members, you'll always get a vast spread of experience whenever you have a question or problem you need support with - it's free to join, and incredibly powerful, so do sign up if you haven't already.

As the year winds down, the CTO Craft Events Team is still hard at work crafting some exciting announcements for 2025 - stay tuned for updates and visit our events page to keep up with what’s coming next.

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Con: London 2025
CTO Craft Con will bring together over 500 Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture in London, March 2025.
CTO Craft Con London 2025
Free networking Mixers for tech leaders near you | CTO Craft
Join dozens of other CTOs and technology leaders in a relaxed environment for networking, chat, ideas, feedback and drinks.
CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

A Field Guide to Team Dynamics and Conflict
A practical guide for leaders to recognize and respond to organizational patterns, from harmonious flow to productive conflict, with tools for designing small, meaningful experiments.
Andy CleffAndy Cleff
W. Edwards Deming’s Red Beads Experiment
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Make Work BetterDaniel Good

About our Sponsors

A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, Damilah, DoIT, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Plandek, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, Vention, YLD

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

An introduction to thinking about risk - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Welcome to a new series about how to think about risk. This series is a crash course, a high-level introduction to the most important concepts and risk frameworks. It’s intended for people who encounter risk from time to time and need some basic tools, but don’t want to make a deep study of it. My hope is that it’ll help you better analyze risk when it comes up for you, and also make it easier to navigate conversations with risk professionals.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Chess Moves for Engineering Leadership
How strategic positioning beats long-term prediction.
Management MattersKrzysztof Jamroz
Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics
Most engineering organizations I’ve worked in or led have tracked some form of engineering metrics. These range from simple metrics like…
MediumIccha Sethi
Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are supposed to make everything faster, clearer, and more focused. And when you’re in a small company or early-stage start-up, they often do. When you’re that smal…
Eleganthack

Culture, People & Teams

RDEL #71: How do protected blocks of time improve engineering outcomes?
A look at how computer assisted protected (CAP) time changes the performance and burnout for information workers, and how that can be applied to engineering teams.
Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipLizzie Matusov
Why Hybrid Work Works
As someone who lives an hour and a half from my London office, I love working from home. I can help my teenagers out of the door in the morning, and I am present when the family comes home. I can have coffee with my wife Ellie before we start work. I prepare dinner during my lunch break, and receive deliveries. I can contribute more effort during my day to Cherrypick, free from distractions, interruptions and the long commute. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week in London. I also love working from the office. It is an opportunity to spend real time with the people I work with. Communication is easier and I spend less time on screens. I can train less experienced colleagues much more efficiently than video chat. I can ask for and give advice and help in person, cutting down long feedback cycles. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week from home. Much of the debate around hybrid working appears to be a zero sum argument about why working from home is “better” or “worse”, and why working in the office is “more” or “less” productive. One is not better than the other; they are just different. I think we need both[^both] for a balanced life. Here are some pointers for how to have a productive conversation about hybrid in your team.
https://chrismdp.com
An impact-based level system for engineering organizations
Defining L1-L6 for individual contributors and leads
MediumElliot Graebert
The Pre-Contagion Window
When a new engineer starts on a team, something interesting happens. Depending on their level of experience and outspokenness, they will…
MediumKristian Dupont

How CTOs Get Answers to Questions They Can't Google....

How isolated do you feel as a technology leader? It can be hard to get support and answers to your questions from within your business - the answer is a Private Community of Practice, where you can use the combined experience of a private group of peers.

Joining a Circle gives you a regular monthly touch-point for co-learning, moral support and friendship.

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Product management is broken. Engineers can fix it
How we’ve redefined the PM and engineer relationship
Product for EngineersJames Hawkins
Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works - Captain, Crew, & Capital
I promised myself never again. Never again would I call a code-yellow. Code-yellows suck, drain team morale, and they leave a lingering distaste amongst all those involved. Yet, during my 8-years at Instacart, they were our most effective and consistent weapon in ensuring we made meaningful progress on our hairiest problems. Yet, within the first […]
Captain, Crew, & Capitalnilamganen
Even high-quality code can lead to tech debt - Stack Overflow
Stack OverflowEira May
The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations
ElevateAddy Osmani

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Why calendar resets don’t work (and what to do instead)
Dealing with endless meetings? Calendar resets aren’t the answer. Try this instead…
MediumMarissa Goldberg
The Impact Of Stress And Mood On Workplace Communication
Stress and mood significantly impact workplace communication. Find out how to combat their effects and watch your teams and business thrive.
eLearning IndustryClifford Latshaw
How to Grow Professional Relationships | Tejas Kumar
A practical, science-backed model for growing quality professional relationships.
Tejas Kumar
3 Powerful Ways to Energize Tired People - Leadership Freak
You’re a black hole when all you think about is what you need from others. Energize tired people by pouring fuel into their cup. Meaning kindles energy. People hate meaningless work. Know what matters. Explain what matters. Reward what matters. Repeat what matters. Energizing people is the heart of successful leadership.
Leadership FreakDan Rockwell

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:

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper