🧊 Time to Talk, Stigma, Energy Management, Prioritisation, The Loop, Cost of Losing a Leader, Evolutionary Leadership: TMW #251 by CTO Craft
Hello all!
As some of you know, burnout, mental health and wellbeing are somewhat central to our approach in helping senior technology leaders; the role is intrinsically a stressful and exhausting one, and without the right support for your mental and spiritual state, the difficulty of the rest of the role is hugely amplified.
This week we celebrate Time to Talk Day 2022 with two Bytes sessions, one on Thursday on the stigma surrounding work-related mental health issues, and one on Friday on energy management for tech leaders. If you're seeing the effects of the last two years of lockdowns and remote working, you're sure to pick up some useful stuff - if you'd like to learn more about Time to Talk Day, check out their website: https://timetotalkday.co.uk/
Stay safe, and be good to yourself
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Craft Bytes - Mental Health: Open Conversations to End Stigma, Thu 3 Feb 2022 at 12:30 GMT
This fireside chat brought to you by CTO Craft, on Time to Talk Day 2022, will discuss The Importance of Open Conversations about Mental Health, to End Stigma and Discrimination.
CTO Craft Bytes - Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time, Fri 4 Feb 2022 at 12:30 GMT
A lot of us feel that we are always behind and are operating in "reactive" mode, missing the opportunity to be in the driver seat. This talk is a collection of tricks that Johann Romefort has learned during the last 20 years.
Reads of the Week
Prioritization, multiple work streams, unplanned work. Oh my!
On development teams, balancing priorities while keeping focus is hard. Without an intentional approach you can quickly find your team submerged in a lot of different work, hurting progress on your most important goals. But the real world is messy. Prioritization is hard.
LinkedIn data reveals what workers want more than money
But before we get to that, you have to hear about this RV. "I really love networking equipment," he said, in an effort to explain the story he’s about to tell.
From out Partners
Skiller Whale Raises $2.9M Seed Round
CTO Craft Expert, Hywel Carver, announces $2.9M Seed Round for Skiller Whale to scale live, hands-on micro-coaching for developers.
Should There Be A Healthy Tension Between Product and Engineering Teams? - from Lohika
Read the insights from CTO Craft Bytes session, where Sarah Hale and Sergey Soloviov share ideas on how to resolve the inter-team tension in a healthy manner.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!
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Culture & People
Your Startup’s Management Training Probably Sucks — Here’s How to Make it Better
Plenty of startups leave manager training on the backburner until they become a bigger company — or try to fit it into a 30-minute lunch-and-learn. Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale, founders of Raw Signal Group, unpack why this is a mistake and outline their top tips for management training that makes a mark.
How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement
Continuous delivery and decoupled architectures such as microservices can massively speed up delivery of value, with code going live in minutes rather than months The key is for product-focused teams to be as autonomous as possible; they should not normally have to wait on other teams
Hire Better With a Show, Not Tell Interview Process
Do a search on the Internet and you’ll find many lists of the top interview questions and tips on how to answer them.
Five Questions to Create Your Successful (Hybrid Remote) Cluster Team
I'm seeing different kinds of “hybrid remote” teams these days. I already wrote about satellite teams (see Five Tips for Your Successful (Hybrid Remote) Satellite Team). Now, I'm also seeing cluster teams. Cluster teams have people in several locations, with collocated people in some locations.
The Loop: A New Way of Organizing
Traditional organizational scaling is broken. Most successful companies grow despite their organizational structures, not because of them. At balena, we make software that powers IoT devices, but we also strive to innovate on our internal structure just as much as we do with our commercial products.
Leadership & Self-management
Finding your leadership style
When it comes to career advice, a common recommendation is you’ll need to work on your leadership to become more senior.
TL;DR A negative impact and cost of losing a good engineering leader and manager.
I would argue that the cost of losing a genuinely outstanding leader can easily reach £170–500k. It’s way more than the roughly estimated 50k I’ve often heard about.
Crafting our leadership teams for fast, effective information flow
When I arrived at Ad Hoc a few months ago as the new VP of Engineering, one of my first responsibilities was to roll out new leadership levels within our fast-growing Engineering team that help us scale effectively.
Managing Yourself
Managing yourself includes managing your internal state (how you feel about yourself and others and your emotions), time, relations at work, dealing with conflicts, setbacks, and difficulties, being present and investing in personal growth.
Traditional Leadership vs Evolutionary Leadership
The single biggest challenge facing leaders today is not fully understanding the negative consequences of traditional leadership. This is closely followed by the challenge of not knowing what to replace it with.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy