🍊 Loneliness Survey, Dev Experience, Psych Safety, Meeting Summaries, Civility, Feedback Loops: TMW #215 by CTO Craft
Hello again!
In the wake of Mental Health Awareness Week here in the UK last week, we got to thinking about the effects of loneliness in engineering leadership - it's a topic that comes up invariably commonly in the coaching work we do with CTOs, especially with first-time leaders moving from individual contribution or being embedded within a development team. Along with the enforced remoteness we've all had to adjust to over the last 14 months or so, sitting at the interface between the commercial and technical parts of a company is a lonely place to be.
To that end, we're going to be looking at ways CTO Craft can do more to help with leader loneliness - in order to do that in the best way, we've created a completely anonymous survey to learn more about how loneliness affects CTOs and other technology leaders.
It's short, no more than 5 minutes out of your day - we'd really appreciate your views, and it's 100% private and secure, just between you and us. If you have any questions, drop me a line by replying to this email - the link to the survey is below
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Loneliness Impact Survey
CTO Craft is gathering information on the effects of loneliness among technology leaders, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the tools and resources leaders use to combat loneliness. 100% anonymous and secure - thank you for your help!
CTO Craft Bytes
📆 Developing Cultural Resilience, Thu 20 May 2021 at 18:00 BST
This panel discussion will outline strategies to drive innovation and overcome obstacles during growth, while managing challenges such as productivity, low morale, and rising stress levels.
Reads of the Week
Why you should invest in good Developer Experience today
In over 50% of organisations, software developers only spent 30-40% of their time on feature development
What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace
“Our office policy is that people should come into the office once per week. Now they are organizing a team meeting with 15 people. I guess some people seem to feel comfortable with that, but I’m not; I have a young family at home and we have been very careful. I can’t say that though.”
From our Partners
Engineering Continuous Improvement - May 20th - from LinearB
Join leaders from Netflix, GitHub and Honeycomb as they take the stage to discuss creating a culture of Continuous Improvement.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!
AWS, Code Climate, CircleCI, Indiespring, LinearB, Honeycomb, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, YLD, iTechArt, Wynter, The Scale Factory, PGS and Skiller Whale
🥝 🥝 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
A Data-Driven Approach to Identifying — and Retaining — Top Employees
The so-called “war for talent,” bandied about in the media since it was coined by McKinsey & Company in 1997, is taking on a whole new meaning post-Covid.
How to Write a Meeting Summary (with Examples)
Participating in dozens of meetings per week means that it’s not always easy to recall the discussions and decisions that have been made.
Praise is different from positive feedback (positive feedback is better)
Every time I’ve written about feedback lately, I’ve made a point of mentioning that most feedback you deliver should be positive. Every time I do so, I get some questions about what, exactly, positive feedback means.
Professionalism vs. Civility at Work!
In Human Resources and Talent Acquisition we have gotten very use to hiring managers making a statement like, “I really need someone with a high level of professionalism in this role”.
Leadership & Self-management
Expect to Struggle When These Two Ingredients are Missing
You can’t lead effectively without transparency. You can’t lead at all without accountability.
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them.
Beware of tight feedback loops
A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, “I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it?” The teacher’s reply was casual, “Ten years.” Impatiently, the student answered,”But I want to master it faster than that.
Stop Swiss Cheesing your calendar
Does your calendar look like a swiss-cheese? A bunch of meetings spread out throughout the week with only 1-2 hours of gaps in between them. This use to be my calendar. Every black box was a meeting. If you wonder when I did work, the answer was in the evenings (10 pm-1 am) and on weekends.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Estimates Can Impede Agile Development, Here's How to Budget
Estimates and budgets can help Agile development teams create great projects in a more efficient way - learn to use your budgets properly. The initial stages of the Agile software development journey can be exciting. It’s a time of possibility and experimentation.
Achieving observability in async workflows
Managing and operating asynchronous workflows can be difficult without the proper tools and architecture that puts observability, debugging, and tracing at the forefront.
Retrospective Antipatterns
The human brain thinks and stores information in patterns. To enhance learning, identify a challenge, give it a name, give it a problem, domain context, explain an abstract solution and the consequences and show different implementations and use it again and again as patterns
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:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy