Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #147
Greetings!
We've had a little makeover at CTO Craft - you can now read all about the coaching and mentoring we provide to CTOs and technology leaders around the world, as well as something new...
You can now join one of our first online mentoring circles, where you'll be part of a small, trusted group meeting monthly online, along with an experienced CTO coach, to talk about your challenges, learn about common models and tools for leaders, building a productive culture and improving communication, to name just a few topics. You can read all about it here and here, or drop a reply to this email to chat about it
Have a great week!
Andy Skipper @ CTO Craft
Reads of the Week
Mentoring Circles for CTOs - join a Community of Practice and accelerate your leadership development
Learn about how a Mentoring Circle can help you build leadership skills as a technologist; super-charge your leadership skills in a Community of Practice for CTOs and other Technology Leaders, meeting weekly or monthly, online or in person
Inspirational 1:1 Leadership Coaching & Mentoring for CTOs
Build on your successes as a technology leader with powerful 1:1 support from an experienced CTO Coach, learning new tools and validating your leadership decisions and strategies
Connecting the world's best CTOs - join CTO Craft's Community of Engineering Leaders
Accelerate your learning by joining our network of CTOs and engineering leaders, and join conversations with our mentors and coaches on Slack and in Monthly Mentoring Circles. Gain validation, join exchanges and put your questions to some of the world's best technology leaders
Culture & People
Always Be Coaching: On Management #36
This time, a return to a topic I addressed in 2016, with a bit more nuance: coaching. To get better at something, get coaching. To feel better about something, get therapy. (Or talk with a loved one.)
Guiding self-organising teams with Rebecca Hill at Lead Dev London
It’s all well and good for the agile manifesto to recommend self-organising teams, but what does that act...
12 Things You Didn’t Plan for When You Started Hiring Remote Employees
Remote work is on the rise. Are you ready? Believe it or not, remote work has grown by 140% since 2005, nearly 10x faster than the rest of the workforce. In fact, over 4.3 million employees (3.2% of the workforce) now work from home at least half the time according to Global Workplace Analytics.
The Iron Triangle: Influencing Behaviors and Creating Outcomes
As leaders, the distillation of our job is to create outcomes (The company does well; the product launches on time and with reasonable quality; retention is decent; etc) and influence behaviors (people do the right thing for whatever definition of “right” is appropriate for the local context).
Leadership & Self-management
Increase Resilience with a Leadership Retrospective
In increasingly turbulent times, one of the most important skills any leader can have is the ability to remain resilient, to bounce back from adversity. Fortunately, it’s a skill that can be practiced and improved.
Anger Is Temporary Madness: The Stoics Knew How to Curb It
Anger is a complicated emotion, but one you can learn to control. Here’s how. People get angry for all sorts of reasons, from the trivial ones (someone cut me off on the highway) to the really serious ones (people keep dying in Syria and nobody is doing anything about it).
Anticipate Problems with a Scenario Planning Exercise
If you’ve read our complete guide to retrospectives and post-mortems, you already know how important it is to bring your team together to discuss how to be more effective in the future. But you don’t have to wait until the end of a project to start trouble-shooting.
How to Know If Someone Is Ready to Be a Manager
When you’re hiring a new manager, the stakes are high. You need someone who can effectively lead people, manage a budget, liaise with upper management — and, usually, do it all from day one.
Agile, Engineering & Product
The 'No Code' Delusion
Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer.
Radical Candor: Software Edition
I was lucky to be in Dropbox’s headquarters when Kim Scott came to speak about her (then) new book “Radical Candor”. Dropbox was nice enough to hand out free copies (yay! free books!) so I actually ended up reading most of the book on the flight home.
Success With Incremental Delivery
One of our internal customers had been having a lot of problems scaling how they work.
What Else?
The case for ... making low-tech 'dumb' cities instead of 'smart' ones
Ever since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can’t get enough of the notion of smart-washing their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.typeform.com/to/XXRNqV
Can you help spread the word? And remember to reply to this email if you’re interested in 1:1 Coaching or Mentoring Circles
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http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy