/Leadership

How To Praise

- Péter Szász tl;dr: “Construct your positive feedback the same way as you would a negative one. Ensure the situation where the action you want to comment on was well understood; focus on the actions of the person you’re giving a feedback to; and show the impact these behaviors had on you and others. This approach will help your team members recognize and build on their strengths.” Peter shares his framework for doing so. 

featured in #600

Applied "Software Engineering at Google"

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: “Google's software engineering practices have evolved to manage our large scale. However, the underlying principles driving these practices are valuable and transferable to organizations of any size. This isn't about blindly copying Google, but about understanding the why behind their methods and adapting the what to your context.”

featured in #600

Rigorous Thinking: No Lazy Thinking

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “Rigorous thinking is asking critical questions about tactics, and having a systematic way of making decisions. It isn’t a single mental model. It’s an approach to problem solving that allows you to deconstruct ideas, gain clarity, and make decisions that are far more likely to be right.” Wes shares her playbook for leaders here. 

featured in #599

The 10 Biggest Leadership Blindspots Based On 10 Years of Research

- Claire Lew tl;dr: Claire shares blindspots, self-assessment questions and actions to remedy each. Blindspots are:(1) What our team doesn't know doesn't hurt them. (2) Everyone should share my sense of urgency. (3) As long as my team likes me, they trust me. (4) I don't play favorites with my team. (5) I treat everyone the way that I want to be treated. And more. 

featured in #598

How Not To Disagree

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don’t agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?”

featured in #598

Setting Policy For Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will explores setting policy as a critical step in engineering strategy, following exploration, diagnosis, and refinement. It defines policy as turning diagnosis into actionable decisions, covering coding practices, hiring mandates, and architectural choices. The chapter outlines structured steps for policy creation, types of policies, and criteria for effective policies. It also discusses handling uncertainty, recognizing constraints, and addressing missing strategies. 

featured in #598

The 5 Most Difficult Employees (And How To Actually Handle Them)

- Claire Lew tl;dr: Claire shares the five most challenging employee archetypes she’s encountered, and the specific strategies that can help you lead them successfully: (1) The Entitled Veteran. (2) The Passive Resister. (3) The Brilliant Aggressor. (4) The Perpetual Victim. (5) The Performance Rollercoaster. 

featured in #598

Delegating Complex Tasks

tl;dr: Most leaders can delegate simple things - e.g. teams, metrics - pretty well. Most leaders struggle with delegating complex skills or responsibilities. Herein we’ll discuss two proven methods for delegating complex tasks that you can use right away - exponential training and suboptimal standardization.

featured in #597

The 5 Most Difficult Employees (And How To Actually Handle Them)

- Claire Lew tl;dr: Claire shares the five most challenging employee archetypes she’s encountered, and the specific strategies that can help you lead them successfully: (1) The Entitled Veteran. (2) The Passive Resister. (3) The Brilliant Aggressor. (4) The Perpetual Victim. (5) The Performance Rollercoaster. 

featured in #597

The Omniscience Expectation And The Mardenfeld

- Kellan Elliot-McCrea tl;dr: “For many leaders the hardest job they have is getting comfortable with not knowing. It is natural to feel like you have to understand everything about the area that you lead. My boss expects me to be able to answer an arbitrary question on the spot, in order to accomplish that I need to be an expert on an increasingly large number of topics. I accomplish this by asking for more and more detailed information from my team, perpetuating this omniscience expectation. There are two obvious problems with the omniscience expectation (and one non-obvious problem).”

featured in #596