🍇 Mental Health, Destroying Teams, Rest, Timezones, Spotify Model, Status Reports: TMW #223 by CTO Craft
Howdy all! Welcome to the week
Hopefully you're going to be able to slow down and recharge over the summer months - if not, I'd urge you to find a way to balance the demands on your energy, to avoid burning out when things start to heat up again in the autumn/fall. It's your job to prioritise your own energy and well-being as much as it is to build products and manage your teams. If you're struggling with exhaustion or stress, drop me a line by email or on Slack, I'm happy to help.
On with the show!
Andy @ CTO Craft
From the CTO Craft Blog
How Can the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre Help Drive Organisational Change?
Andreas Wolff shows how you can transpose Conway's Law to improve systemic communication and collaboration across organisations.
Reads of the Week
The State of Mental Health in a year of COVID remote working
For a huge segment of the UK workforce, COVID-19 changed the reality of work of employees in companies large and small. Many went from being in a physical office space every day to working remotely at home.
Pockets of rest enable careers.
Being burnt out at work feels like this year’s life crisis. Almost every conversation I have with a friend in the industry lingers on the topic of struggling to focus at work.
Writing our 3-year technical vision - Eventbrite
One of my initial goals was to come up with an overarching technical vision for the whole company aligned with our 3-year business strategy, and that would move us away from a monolithic architecture and central SRE team to a distributed system where we shift ownership to each team.
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Culture & People
Useful techniqes to destroy your entire team
Today we’re going to dive into useful techniques that can help you to destroy your entire team quickly and efficiently. We’ll explore some effective measures to ensure that your healthy team turns into a bunch of disillusioned and scared people in no time. Ready? Here we go.
Introverts Working From Home: How to Help Them Thrive
Do some of your team members sit silently in meetings or rarely speak up, even when colleagues or managers ask them to weigh in? Do they only occasionally attend social events, whether in person or on Zoom, and prefer remote to in-person work?
An Engineer's Guide to Working Across Time Zones
Forget the 'future' of work — that future's already here. That doesn't mean we still don't have a lot to learn about working collectively and supporting each other in a hybrid world, though. Take it from HubSpot Tech Lead Jakub Derda, who has years of experience leading distributed teams.
The Handbook of Handbooks for Decentralised Organising
A mega list of handbooks and toolkits for groups working without top-down management from social movements to workplaces open source for anyone to read, update, share
Leadership & Self-management
The Craft Of Managing And Leading
Bartleby, the workplace columnist for The Economist, wrote recently about the nature of craftsmanship at work. He quotes an academic paper whose authors “define craft as ‘a humanist approach to work that prioritizes human engagement over machine control.
100 Percent of Managers Fail
That’s not a scare headline, it’s a fact of life. It’s not the finding of some new study either. It’s been true as long as we’ve had managers. Managers fail because they’re people and people fail. That means you and everyone on your team. No exceptions.
5 Easy-To-Spot Hallmarks of (Un)Ethical Leadership
Quibbling about terminology –the words used to describe unethical behaviors as they are uniquely defined by different groups – just misdirects our attention away from some foundational, easy-to-spot signs of unethical leadership.
3 Proven Indicators You Are Growing as a Leader
Like Don't move Unlike 1Can you actually determine if you are growing as a leader? Absolutely. In fact, recognizing your progress is not only possible, it’s imperative.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Project Status Reports: The Go-To Guide for Managers
Project team members have a lot on their plate. And it’s not uncommon for them to log into their email every day and get multiple messages asking for updates on the various projects in the works.
Stealing from the best, lessons from three years at Spotify - Kevin Goldsmith
I was privileged to be a senior leader in the product development team at Spotify from 2013 until 2016. I joined the company right after the adoption of the now well-known "Spotify Model." As a Tribe Lead and then Alliance Lead, I helped in the models' evolution as the company grew to over 800 developers across five offices on two continents.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy