Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

You Can't Delegate Culture: An Interview With Patrick Collison
14 minutes read.

Patrick Collison is a fascinating thinker, one that can frame something in a sentence where I had to use 3 paragraphs. I remember that someone asked him "How do you build a happy culture?" and he replied with "Simply hire happy people. They are more fun to work with, and already know how to communicate positively." -- I really enjoyed reading this interview (and Elad's book is pre-ordered), and I believe that with a good cup of tea or coffee it would be a wonderful read for your weekend.

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Life Got Tough for Clippy After He Was Let Go From Microsoft
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Week in Review Leadership Comms
4 minutes read.

Having a way to bring relevant context to more employees as the company grows is a real challenge. One one hand people want to focus and often feel that they don't really need to know about everything around them, and on the other hand - if you take that approach too far, people will miss the big picture and would ask for more details. Lara Hogan with a "Week in Review" format that might be the right balance.

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Cognitive Bias and Why Performance Management Is So Hard
6 minutes read.

"Your brain is constantly simplifying, but you have to prevent your brain from jumping to these conclusions — because we’re often wrong." -- so many powerful gems in this post by Osman Ahmed Osman. My favorite takeaway, one that is so easy to miss and do harm because of that, was this observation: "Trying to motivate a person to do a task that they’re procrastinating on due to anxiety is likely to have the opposite effect — it makes the task more meaningful, and increases anxiety."

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The OS Canvas: How to Rebuild Your Organization From the Ground Up
15 minutes read.

If you're going through the process of defining (or re-evaluate) your company's Core Values and Roles&Responsibilities, using the OS Canvas offered by Aaron Dignan can be an interesting practice to dive deeper.

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Know Thyself: The Power of a Decision Journal
4 minutes read.

As someone who practiced writing my "Captain's Log" and even wrote about it in my book, it's no surprise that Sam Kyle's approach and thinking about the topic is really important to me. I suggest sharing Sam's 7 steps to journal your decisions with managers in your organization, and then take some time to discuss some of them and learn from each other.

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Two Hours Per Team
5 minutes read.

Dan North's post is useful not only if you're a consultant but also if you're a manager of managers, having limited time to manage multiple projects at the same time while providing useful guidance to your teammates. I found that this approach works extremely well when trying to help managers in my organization feel more in control: "One area I work on with teams is how to measure themselves. This is a kind of bootstrapping coaching so that over time they start coming up with experiments of their own, which is always an exciting shift." -- this takes time to get to, and requires a good definition around the team's purpose and responsibilities.

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Managing Remotely, While Remotely Managing (Slides)
4 minutes read.

Lindsay Holmwood shares his lessons learned so far leading a remote team, in an easy to follow deck (I'm sure the talk is even better). Check the Antipatterns slides and make sure you're not sending mixed signals to your team.

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@shanselman: Activity != Impact. Don’t confuse the two. Be thoughtful and precise in how you use your time.

@peterseibel: Nobody ever got fired for using Jira. They quit first.