The Manager's Guide – #76
The Manager's Guide – #76
Weekly Hand-Picked Collection Edition
Leadership is a skill
“It is time we value leadership skills higher within tech and recognise that they can and should be trained.” - Amen!
💡 Leadership is recognized as a crucial skill, especially in roles requiring management of other managers.
🛠️ Effective leaders often focus more on strategic oversight rather than hands-on technical tasks.
📈 The value of leadership skills increases significantly as one ascends to higher managerial positions.
👨💼 A leader's main role may involve decision-making, guiding teams, and setting vision, rather than direct technical contribution.
🌟 The ability to lead effectively can compensate for a lack of recent hands-on experience in a specific technical field.
The most important goal in designing software is understandability
🎯 Understandability is the top priority in software design, trumping security, performance, and correctness because it enables the achievement of other goals.
🐛 Misunderstanding software leads to defects, affecting correctness, security, and performance, as developers struggle to implement features correctly.
🔒 Security is compromised without understandability, with misunderstandings causing base security issues and missed requirements.
🚀 Performance enhancements can fail without proper understanding, possibly breaking other critical functions or introducing new issues.
🧠 Personal struggles with understanding are common, not reflecting on one's competence but often on the code's complexity.
📖 Clear code and thorough documentation are essential for understandability, including system architecture, decision records, and code comments.
👀 Regular reviews and updates of documentation are crucial, ensuring it remains relevant and aids in understanding the system.
🔄 Gradual improvements enhance understandability over time, demonstrating the value of continuous refinement in software development.
How to Deal with Negative Behavior
“A quick disclaimer before I jump into this evergreen topic in Engineering Management discussions: This article is about dealing with someone on your team.”
🤝 Emphasize behavior over personality: Focus on addressing specific behaviors rather than labeling individuals as negative.
🛠️ Understand context for effective management: Separate feelings from facts when assessing negative behavior to decide on an appropriate response.
🏆 Build trust in managerial relationships: Prioritize trust-building, especially if you haven't worked long with the person, to effectively address negative behaviors.
🗣️ Provide a safe space for expression: Create an environment where team members can express negative thoughts in one-on-ones without judgement.
👥 Highlight the impact of negativity: Address how negative behavior not only affects the individual but also team morale and collaboration.
⚖️ Insist on respect and civility: Maintain a workplace where mutual respect is fundamental, and address any disrespect or bullying immediately.
🤗 Share and show empathy: Provide context and understanding to help team members see different perspectives and mitigate negative reactions.
🌟 Encourage passionate concern without negativity: Guide team members to express deep care for their work constructively.
🎯 Focus on controllable factors: Help team members differentiate between what they can and cannot control to reduce anxiety and increase effectiveness.
🔄 Adopt a "disagree and commit" approach: Cultivate a culture where it’s safe to express dissent, but once decisions are made, the focus should shift to implementation and learning.
🔄 Continuous support for behavior change: Regularly provide feedback to reinforce positive changes and support ongoing improvement.
The Evolution of the Executive Team
🔄 The concept of leverage in executive leadership is not just about productivity but focuses on understanding and utilizing tasks that generate significant long-term value.
🤝 A CEO’s most impactful source of leverage is their executive team, which when managed effectively, can yield substantial returns on investment.
🆔 The identity of the executive team should evolve to meet business requirements, with changes in team composition and leadership happening both subtly and visibly.
🛠️ The composition of the executive team should be carefully considered, balancing information needs, relationship-building, and decision-making efficacy without fostering groupthink.
🌐 Leadership within the team is dynamic, requiring CEOs to continually assess and adjust their involvement and delegation to maintain team effectiveness and morale.
🏢 Team culture is crucial and includes observable behaviors, shared beliefs, and norms that promote productive actions and penalize counterproductive ones.
🤔 Understanding and managing the team's culture is vital for maintaining a high-performance environment, facilitated by the CEO through interventions and regular assessments.
How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity
🧭 Capable leaders embrace complexity by understanding and utilizing a range of soft skills often related to "culture fit."
✍️ These leadership skills are explicitly defined in formats that avoid jargon, such as general behavior observations and "the ability to..." descriptions.
🧠 The post provides a set of detailed interview questions designed to evaluate potential hires or prepare individuals for job interviews, focusing on these complex navigation skills.
🌐 Key leadership capabilities include fostering new interaction patterns, encouraging patience in problem-solving, blending diverse perspectives, and maintaining a light touch.
🔄 Leaders skilled in complexity are proficient in balancing the tension between immediate actions and long-term goals, demonstrating patience, and integrating diverse viewpoints and strengths.
🛠️ The article advocates for tailoring approaches to the specific nature of challenges and environments, acknowledging that complex problem-solving skills are not one-size-fits-all.
🌱 It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and developing these skills within a team or company's culture, suggesting internal discussions before applying these capabilities in real-world scenarios.
A Distributed Systems Reading List
🔄 Key theoretical failure modes discussed include fail-stop, crash, omission, performance, and Byzantine failures, highlighting different scenarios in which they may occur.
🤝 Consensus is a major theme, with the text explaining its critical role in distributed systems, particularly in the selection of a leader to enforce decisions.
📄 The FLP Result and CAP Theorem are prominently discussed, providing foundational knowledge on the limitations and challenges in achieving consensus and maintaining system properties under different conditions.
📤 Message passing definitions and types, such as unicast, anycast, broadcast, and different delivery guarantees (e.g., at least once, exactly once), are explained to detail how data moves within distributed systems.
✅ Idempotence and state machine replication are emphasized as crucial concepts for ensuring consistent system behavior despite repeated actions or state transitions.
⏲️ Practical challenges in distributed computing, like network reliability and latency, are also addressed, alongside the common pitfalls that can affect system performance and reliability.
🔄 Consistency models are elaborated upon, offering a spectrum from linearizability to eventual consistency, each providing a framework for understanding how updates propagate and are perceived within a system.
🕰️ The use of logical clocks for ordering events and CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) for managing data consistency in distributed environments is highlighted, underscoring ongoing advancements and research in the field.
That’s all for this week’s edition
I hope you liked it, and you’ve learned something — if you did, don’t forget to give a thumbs-up and share this issue with your friends and network.
See y’all next week 👋