6 min read

🥑 Commitment vs Consensus, Job Posts, Managers Matter, Virtual Meeting Fatigue, Blind Spots: TMW #270 by CTO Craft

Hey there! Good to see you

We've been hard at work pulling together all the amazing talks from the CTO Craft MiniCon for you to watch, even if you didn't have a ticket. You can catch them all on the CTO Craft YouTube channel.

Don't forget our weekly CTO Craft Bytes event series has now restarted following the MiniCon, and we've got some great speakers and topics lined up over the next few months. This Friday, Marek Gajda of The Software House will be in conversation with a panel including the Pragmatic Engineer himself, Gergely Orosz, as they look at their recent State of Frontend Development report. A must-watch!

Don't forget, if you're in an engineering leadership role, we'd love to have you in the CTO Craft Slack community, which currently has just under 4,000 members. If you're interested, jump over here and leave your details: CTO Craft Community Application

That's all - see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Why Commitment is More Important Than Consensus in Group Decision-Making - from the CTO Craft blog

Why Commitment is More Important Than Consensus in Group Decision-Making - from the CTO Craft blog

Why aiming for consensus in group decision-making is wasteful and why you should aim to get the group’s commitment instead.

Fireside chat: The Perfect Job Post - Luca Rossi of Refactoring.fm

CTO Craft Bytes

How does your org fit in the State of Frontend '22? Fri 17 Jun 2022 at 12:30 BST

How does your org fit in the State of Frontend '22? Fri 17 Jun 2022 at 12:30 BST

This event, brought to you by CTO Craft and The Software House, will be focused on the current frontend landscape based on the recently-released the State of Frontend 2022 Report from The Software House.

Panelists:

Gergely Orosz - Writer, speaker, The Pragmatic Engineer

Joel Albert - CTO at MCD Partners

Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen - Engineering Manager @ Uber

Watch of the Week

Satya Nadella & Adam Grant: Why Managers Matter as Much as Tech

Satya Nadella & Adam Grant: Why Managers Matter as Much as Tech

Drawing on experience of “re-founding” Microsoft—as well as new data—Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella highlights how great technology depends on caring managers and a culture of psychological safety.

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, Steamhaus, Swarmia

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

The Problem With Promoting High Performers

The Problem With Promoting High Performers

The internal struggle is real. Someone on your team is exceeding expectations consistently and is ready for that next role in their career ladder, but promoting them could have a major impact on your team.

What to do when your feedback doesn't land

What to do when your feedback doesn't land

Rather than simply assume you’re on the same page, your instincts are right here: you want to triple check that this person has internalized the feedback and will begin to make some changes. Here’s what to do.

What Does Your Culture Value: People “Efficiency” or Work Throughput?

What Does Your Culture Value: People “Efficiency” or Work Throughput?

A senior manager said, “We give our resources everything they could need: technology, tools, even some training. Why are they so slow?” I asked, “How many projects are they working on?” “Each resource has at least two projects so they stay productive and efficient.

The Data Behind Virtual Meeting Fatigue and How to Combat It

The Data Behind Virtual Meeting Fatigue and How to Combat It

95% of workers experience video meeting fatigue. Let that sink in. 95%. But what’s behind the data? Is video really the culprit? How can we guard against fatigue and protect employee well-being?

Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap

Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap

It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders. Interestingly, nearly all of them seem to have coalesced around “area of scope” as a useful proxy for level.

Leadership & Self-management

How to Overcome Leadership Blind Spots

How to Overcome Leadership Blind Spots

For confident leaders, change is an opportunity. Shifts, whether in the market or in the organization itself, create new possibilities to be explored. Of course, with new possibilities comes the need for decision-making and action.

The ROI for manager training: Why it’s your best defense against the great resignation

The ROI for manager training: Why it’s your best defense against the great resignation

Training can turn your managers into your best asset for creating a positive workplace culture, one that not only keeps your best people but draws in the next generation of top performers. Employees’ new demand to work from home is not the only element driving The Great Resignation.

Conflict Management in the Workplace: How to Deal with Conflict as a Manager

Conflict Management in the Workplace: How to Deal with Conflict as a Manager

I’m already observing aggressive body language, discomfort, uneasiness, strain and tension in the words, pitch and tone of voices in the team. It isn’t something I hoped to start my induction with at all...

Becoming an Organizational Leader

Becoming an Organizational Leader

As your career progresses, it can become increasingly difficult to understand how to move up the ladder as an individual contributor.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

While I was at PKC, our team did upwards of twenty code audits, many of them for startups that were just around their Series A or B (that was usually when they had cash and realized that it’d be good to take a deeper look at their security, after the do-or-die focus on product market fit).

DORA change failure rate – what, why, and how

DORA change failure rate – what, why, and how

Out of all the four DORA metrics, change failure rate is the one causing the most headache to engineering organizations. At Swarmia, we’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure we get it right to help software teams drive good business outcomes.

Cargo Culting Software Engineering Practices

Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting work in progress, desk checks, spikes, stories, and tasks.

That’s it!

If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!

https://ctocraft.com/community

Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy