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🍝 Technical Health, Prioritisation, Followership, Defusing Tension, Drama Triangles, Platform Changes, Procrastination: TMW #336

Hello again, welcome to the week!

We've put together a quick summary of the first ever in-person CTO Craft Con at the end of May, where nearly 300 leaders joined us in East London for two days of talks about engineering strategy, planning and much more. Take a look at the link below to see how it all went down.

Following the massive success of the event, we're already knee-deep in planning the next one, at the beginning of November: CTO Craft Con: Culture & the CTO! It's coming together nicely, and will be in the same Tobacco Dock venue. If you'd like to be the first to hear about tickets when they go on sale, you can pre-register here: https://conference.ctocraft.com/november-2023/

Thanks so much to the 700 or so members who provided us with their anonymous compensation data - as you'll have seen on Thursday last week, we've pulled together our findings in a report co-created by CTO Craft and our friends at Albany Partners, and there's some real gold in here. Take a look, and gain some insights to take into your next compensation review:

2023 Compensation Survey: The Report

That's it, on with the links! Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

A quick summary and takeaways from our first in-person CTO Craft Con | CTO Craft
In May 2023, we hosted our first in-person CTO Craft Con with over 250 tech leaders. Here’s a summary of the highlights and key takeaways.
CTO CraftSarah Haselwood
CTO Craft Bytes: Using Big Picture Measures to Effect Positive Change
This Bytes is brought to you in partnership with Code Climate. We’ll be joined by Virginia Toombs, VP Engineering Operations in EverQuote.
Eventbrite

Reads of the Week

From Technical Debt to Technical Health with HealthCheck
Why software fails and how you can practically address it with a 6-step plan.
MediumMikael Vesavuori
LSW#27 ⛵️Sailboats, fishermen, and careers
When rules rule, the game itself gets forgotten
The Leading Sapiens WeeklySheril Mathews

From our Sponsors

Register for a free lunch & learn for your engineering team on avoiding the pitfalls of working with AI

Working with AI can accelerate software development. But without expertise, it can generate poorly written, unidiomatic and incorrect code that introduces new ethical, legal and security risks. Register for Hywel to speak to your teams about how LLMs work, what they're good and bad at, and some practical advice for using AI assistants effectively.

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Thanks as always to all the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, Vention, Jellyfish, LinearB, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Prioritising effectively and getting work done as managers
Losing control of your time? Here is how to break free from the chaos, prioritise and get stuff done.
Effective Software LeadsJames Samuel
The dark side of the leadership.
That nobody talks about.
Elena's Growth ScoopElena Verna
Followership
In organizational settings, we take leadership far more seriously than followership. Followership is a rarely used term in organizations. In my career, I’ve only heard of followership once when a wiser colleague proposed we include “willingness to follow” as an expectation for senior individual cont…
because writing is clarifying
The Eight Most Common Goal-Setting Blunders in the Workplace
And what to do instead.
Better HumansKatrine Tjoelsen

Culture, People & Teams

The Drama Triangle
Living in The Drama Triangle, like anything we do from a reactive mindset, is costly: It’s ineffective over the long term, exhausting, demotivating, and endlessly limiting. Yet, accordingly to some estimates, 90% of people spend 90% of their time operating from this place.
Ken NortonKen Norton
How to Proactively Defuse Tension on Your Team
Unaddressed and unresolved interpersonal tensions and toxic behavior can lead to organizational failure. They can impact team performance, collaboration, and productivity, create operational friction among teams, and cause employees to feel disengaged, distrustful, and unmotivated. While conflict at…
Harvard Business ReviewDaisy Auger-Dominguez
Resilience requires helping each other out
A common failure mode in complex systems is that some part of the system hits a limit and falls over. In the software world, we call this phenomenon resource exhaustion, and a classic example of th…
Surfing ComplexityLorin Hochstein
3 Ways Leaders Can Foster Psychological Safety in a Hybrid Environment
Specific behaviours to enhance your team’s performance and engagement
Management MattersLiliana Nakamura

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Primer for planning BIG platform changes
We are about to add a BIG new feature to our platform. To be fair, we’re always adding new features to the platform, but this one is…
MindGym TechDavid Lush
Cut CI Costs Now: The Hidden GitHub Actions Trick
Contic
Estimation Isn’t for Everyone
The Evolution of Agility in Software Development
NYT OpenThe NYT Open Team
The 5 Dimensions of API Consistency | Postman Blog
Effectively creating APIs at scale requires understanding these five “API consistency” dimensions.
Postman BlogArnaud Lauret

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Stop wasting your time: 5 Powerful Tips to Conquer Procrastination
Unlock Your Potential and Beat Procrastination with These Practical Strategies
Level Up CodingSĂ©verin Bruhat
Making Time for Our Mental Health and Well-Being within the Hybrid / Remote Workplace
So often, well-intended hybrid/remote organisations and leaders will focus on surface level mental health/well-being support initiatives. This article will highlight the importance of addressing this important topic from a holistic perspective, addressing systemic processes and policies to ensure th…
InfoQHelen Bartimote
Elevate your Mind Above Your Struggles: Only You Can Stop You - New Trader U
Life poses challenges, struggles, and adversities for everyone. No one remains untouched. These struggles, daunting as they seem, can become the stepping
New Trader UJulianna Summers

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper