Leadership, Awareness, and Fear

~ Aaron Douglas, sometime this week I've been a team lead for a couple years now at Automattic - a little over a year of that with the larger team (Go Slytherin!!). I've made several discoveries of what being a lead (team, project, technical) means. I've realized one thing I have to do is to put myself into a higher state of awareness and embrace fears. AwarenessLeads have to see the business landscape with different eyes. My main goal as a team and project lead is to unblock the pathways for my teammates to succeed. I'm required to involve myself in conversations that are out-of-band from what the team is connected to. These conversations get summarized in my head and become part of discussions with project leads and individual 1:1 meetings. I have to pick out the important things that relate to the team and bring that into conversations to establish insight amongst everyone. ...

February 15, 2017 · 3 min · Aaron

Every Good Manager Will...

This week Michael Lopp (VP Engineering @ Slack) posted a summary of Tweets responding to the question "Regardless of seniority every good manager will...". I took that list and tried to correlate the responses into several buckets. I used Trello to visualize this. https://trello.com/b/Wr78Mx6k/good-managers I came up with five buckets: Compassion/Empathy - Feel like a human and realize others feel too.Give/Take Feedback - Listen to others, tell them what's going right & wrong, and do the same for yourself.Filter/Map/Reduce - Take in the world above and turn it into smaller things that are important for your people to know.Unblock - Don't be an obstacle for your people to succeed - and help remove obstacles from their paths.Trust - Everyone is an adult and was hired for a reason - trust them in their decisions and make sure to gain your people's trust.

January 10, 2017 · 1 min · Aaron