tl;dr:Brie provides 10 personal templates for "more efficient progress towards your goals and make the experience of getting there more satisfying." Examples include Ongoing Stack Rank (OSR), “It’s Only The Weekend When” Post-It, “What I’m Proud Of” Scrapbook.
tl;dr:"I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce." When this issue is escalated, "the manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue." Will discusses his approach to resolve the issue.
tl;dr:Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form your infrastructure organization: a small team of 4-8 engineers. Later on, you'll have 70 engineers across 8-10 teams. Those are both stable organizational configurations. The transition between the small to the large team can be difficult and unstable, and Will provides us with a playbook on how to execute it.
tl;dr:Will believes being too attached to any given mental model is what distinguishes managers perceived to have good judgment from those perceived to have bad judgment. "Run a problem through one mental model, and then another. If both models agree on the problem or approach, then great. However, if they disagree, spend time digging into why. There’s something valuable to learn there." He shows us how he's approaching headcount planning this way.
tl;dr:As a leader, you must trust your team. However, trusting your team can, a times, be at odds with helping them succeed. Human error or bad processes can come into play. Will uses "inspected trust:" when someone "brings a problem or a concern to you, trust them that there is a problem, but give yourself space to independently verify their interpretation of the problem." He highlights various ways of doing this.
tl;dr:This article covers management planning breaking them down into the following: vision, reality, decisions, the plan & accountability, and execution preparedness. Starts with the goals of planning, such as: (1) Focus on the right global priorities. (2) Ensure clear ownership. (3) Coordination across shared workstreams. (4) High shipping velocity.
tl;dr:Senior leadership roles are often unposted and delegated to exec firms. Will outlines several ways to find such roles: (1) Through peers. (2) Exec recruiters through your network. (3) Crowd-sourced searches, such as small mailing lists. (4) Twitter.
tl;dr:Will believes the most valuable leadership skill is "how to think correctly," inspired by the book Thinking In Systems. Despite many considering themselves as system thinkers, they "model casually." Will provides 3 rules for thinking in systems safely: (1) When your model and reality conflict, reality is always right. (2) Models are immutable, but reality isn’t, it's always changing. (3) Every model omits information; some omit critical information.
tl;dr:Most hiring funnels miss a closing call and the end of the hiring process. This is 2 steps: (1) Ask for the candidates concerns. (2) Answer them by telling the best version of the truth. "The artistry of the closing call is finding the most compelling path between their starting concerns and accepting your offer. Infrequently... you’ll come to realize that the role really doesn’t give the candidate what they’re looking for. It’s far better to realize now than after they’ve joined."
tl;dr:"It’s more effective to capture existing capacity than create new capacity" in a large company. The opposite is true in startup & growth companies. In large companies: "If you need more headcount, convince leadership to require every team to send a volunteer to work on your project. If you’re missing a leader, oblige one on a peer team to move to yours." Hiring is slow and restrictive.