Management on The Dangling Pointer

Leadership, Awareness, and Fear

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 13:28:08 +0000

~ 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.

Awareness

Leads 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.

Every Good Manager Will...

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:49:40 +0000

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.