Every problem is an opportunity for someone else
Welcome to the 4th edition of Lead Kindly! This is the temporary name of the newsletter now, and we’ll see if it sticks! If you have opinions let me know. I am looking for something short/concise, something that emphasizes empathy and kindness, is related to engineering leadership but not specific to managers.
I am still sick this week, and I’m happy to see this weeks article still come together! It gives me great confidence in the long term. Two of five kids are also throwing up, so wish me luck!
📚 Read This Week
What’s Success for Engineering Managers? by Leonard Stellbrink
Leon argues that success for engineering managers can be measured by how self-sufficient an engineering team is. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot for my team. One thing I try to consider is how long a period of PTO (Paid time off) do I feel comfortable taking before I think something is going to catch on fire without me. This can fluctuate during different periods, but that itself is pretty telling. It’s harder for me to take PTO during quarterly planning, so that says to me I have room to grow in helping my team be more independent and empower them to make decisions without me! How do you measure success for an engineering team? Did Leon miss anything you think is important?
Software Mentoring: Five Important Lessons To Remember by Adam Sahinovic
Mentoring is part of what helped me make my leap into management instead of staying as an engineer. I have had a very successful career of mentoring others, and I’ve been lucky to have so many fantastic mentees! Over the years I have learned how to help others grow their skills and I’m sure you’ll see many articles shared here about it. Today we take a look at Adam Sahinovic’s 5 part lessons on mentorship. I had never conciously thought about lesson 3, but it’s solid advice. I have a different take than lesson 4, but this blurb is already too long. If you give it a read, let me know your thoughts! I’d love to keep chatting about it.
Why nice managers are BAD managers by and
Radical Candor is one of the most recommended books I’ve seen for engineering leadership, and this was a fantastic review. Imo it is a seriously good book because it makes you look inward and face where your “good” qualities, like being nice, are causing harm and potentially causing ruin. Re-reading Radical Candor is on my short list! In the meantime, Orel and Anton draw out a lot of the core lessons in the book. I would highly recommend reading their article as a primer and then reading the book to reinforce each lesson.
🎧 Listened or Watched This Week
Down With Pseudo-Productivity: Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work [61 minutes] from
Watching people work is fake (pseudo) productivity, and it doesn’t work. I will think back to this podcast every time I read about a company requiring knowledge works (writers, software engineers, etc) back to the physical office. Cal Newport discusses his new book Slow Productivity on the AOM podcast, breaking down the anti-productivity movement (no idea this was a thing) and what he believes to be the true underlying issues. I’ve never read any of Cal Newport’s books, but Deep Work is already on the list. It looks like I will at least be adding Slow Productivity to the list.
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
You own all of your time.
I have 5 kids and a full time job, I am no stranger to the phrase “ugh, I don’t have enough time for all the things I want to do!” This feels so true and inescapable. It’s really easy to say I don’t have time to go to the gym, or I don’t have time to work on the newsletter, or time to relax. I can list hundreds of video games I want to play, programming problems I want to solve, books I want to read, locations I want to visit, desserts I want to make… It’s easy, but it’s also dishonest. I am choosing to write these words now instead of doing any of those things, and if they were a bigger priority than I should be doing them instead. I own my time, and I decide how to spend it.
I’m not going to say you magically have all the time in the world to do everything you’ve wanted by realizing this idea, but you get to choose what the priorities are. At any particular moment, you are doing what you wanted to do the most! For me right now it’s sitting with my 2 year old while she watches True, and I write this on my laptop.
Where does this leave us at work? Aren’t there things you have to do?
You can easily feel overwhelmed by a full calendar full of meetings. We’ve talked about the power behind saying no, and this is one manifestation. You need to know where you want to spend your time, and prioritize that. If you feel yourself saying “I don’t have enough time, I want to do X!” then you can look at the things you are doing and ask what you can drop. Do you really need to attend that sync meeting? Is leading that workshop still in your best interest? And so on. If the answer is no to everything you’re doing, then you’re already doing the right things! Let go of the fact that you can’t do X.
There are many other angles to look at this, and we’ll tackle one in the quote of the week! Before you go on though, what are wishing you made more time for? How can you fit it into your schedule? What can you do less of?
💡 Quote of the Week
Every problem is an opportunity for someone else.
I have no idea where I got this quote from, I hope I made it up because I love it, but regardless it was the first one added to my quote database and it was how I walked into engineering management.
As an engineer it was my job to solve problems. As I became more senior, I would start to pass problems on to others. “Sure I could do this in an hour, but I wouldn’t learn much. I’ve done this a hundred times. My mentee however would maybe take a few hours or a day to figure it out, and maybe not end up with the best solution, but they would learn a lot! Let’s give it to them instead or pair on a solution”. Sometimes it’s not about the optimal near term solution, but the longer term growth for the individual or the team, or even the company.
A great personal example is that we’ve identified a number of issues that live in other teams code. I won’t get into the details, but we could technically figure out solutions ourselves for those teams pretty quickly. This is an area where our team are topic experts (accessibility) and know how to identify and fix the problem. However, if we fix these for teams, two weeks later when the next product feature ships, they will end up (most likely) with the same accessibility issues that we fixed in their other features. However, if we pass this opportunity (the bug fix) to someone else (the other teams), they will learn how to identify and fix the issue. Hopefully the next feature they make won’t include this class of accessibility bugs because they now know what to look for, they can think in a more accessibility friendly way.
TLDR: DELEGATE. The point is not to abdicate responsibility, but to help others grow and learn.
📖 What I'm reading
No affiliate links!
I finished If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. WHAT A RIDE! Such a good book. Jason Pargin is an amazing author, I hate it. I love it. I think my next book will be Predictably Irrational, I’ll decide tonight and you’ll find out next week :)
📈 State of the Newsletter
I’ve been pretty sick which was disruptive for last week, and still plagued me this week. I am finally starting to feel better, and I am so happy I was able to keep writing and producing these through illness. Most of my new habits die when they come into contact with a sickness, so for me this was the litmus test that this is here to stay!
My goal beyond maintaining the weekly learning and sharing is to publish self contained articles. I am not putting these on a schedule, but I have a ton of ideas and have started writing many of them. I am close to finishing my first one!
We’re at 34 subscribers as of writing. That’s pretty neat! If you’ve enjoyed the content, please write me a comment or share Lead Kindly with someone!
Thanks for the shoutout! And I loved the quote :)