Lead Kindly by Doing the Hardest Thing First

Welcome to the 8th edition of Lead Kindly! We just passed 50 subscribers!!! Thank you for all your kindness and support in helping grow this publication. To all the old and new readers, thank you for your time, and I hope you find something valuable this week!

📚 Read This Week

The Contagion by

Michael Lopp

I will likely be including a Rands in Repose each week for the foreseeable future because it forces me to read them more, and they are incredible.

Here Michael discusses a very hard problem you will likely encounter as a leader, so hard in fact that he doesn’t have a solution! Yet there are a ton of rich lessons here, such as “With each hop, humans tend to tweak information in their favor” and “Simpler thoughts travel farther faster”.

So often writers want to convince you that a problem is hard, and that they can provide you an easy solution. It is refreshing to see a hard problem discussed in such detail but no easy fix in sight.

How to Improve Your Soft Skills as a Remote Worker by Rebecca Knight

I’ve never been a huge fan of “soft” vs “hard” skills, surely we could find better language to describe them (especially since I find most software engineers struggle with the soft skills and typically excel at the “hard” skills ;p). However, there are really solid practical tips here if, like me, you find yourself in a remote-first world. My favorite was a very concise bullet point filled with things I was nodding to while reading: “Be curious, practice active listening, and take note of important details about your colleagues to show you pay attention.”

Do attachment styles impact leaders (and therefore psychological safety) in the workplace? by Psychological Safety

If you’re familiar with attachment styles, this article argues that your attachment style has an impact for leaders and their ability to create psychological safety in their teams and organization. A compelling idea that I will be spending more time learning about! Let me know if you have an opinion here, I would love to read it! I personally don’t know enough about attachment theory to know if it’s real but it’s always fun to learn new ideas.

🎧 Listened or Watched This Week

Want to Be Happy? Give Yourself Reasons to Admire Yourself [53 minutes] from AOM

This was the most compelling podcast I listened to last week! It discusses your virtues, and how these tie into your sense of self worth and esteem. The focus was on depression, but I couldn’t help but be drawn to how this could help me be a better and more confident leader. Looking forward to learning more about the guests “virtue self-signaling theory”.

🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week

Do the hardest thing first

This unintentionally turned into another article. I want these productivity sections to be concise and useful, so here is a summary to tied you over until I hit publish:

Beginning your day with the most challenging task can significantly boost your productivity. Tackling tough problems first takes advantage of your peak morning energy, reduces the likelihood of procrastination, and creates positive momentum for the day. Prepare for this task the night before, minimize morning distractions, and if needed, consult with a colleague to gain fresh perspectives (or turn them into an accountability buddy!). Start your day with the hardest task, and lead your team to achieve greater efficiency and success.

💡 Quote of the Week

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments

I don’t know where I got this from, but it has been a major theme of my career as a manager, as well as my personal relationships.

If you do not tell others what you expect, you are setting them (and yourself) up for failure. It is a very obvious thing in hindsight, but it is incredibly common to assume that someone else has the same understanding you do. Until you’ve validated your story, you cannot assume this is true. Here are 5 examples:

1. If you delegate a task, ensure the person or team knows it was delegated to them, and in the way you expect. Do you align on the final output? Do they know the quality you’re looking for? What are they empowered to make decisions on without you, and what needs your approval?

2. If a project has a deadline, make sure it is clear and communicated to everyone. Missed deadlines not only impact the projects success, but are frustrating for everyone involved to learn they were not in sync.

3. Project priorities that are ambiguous will lead to assumptions. This will lead to misspent time and resources.

4. Misaligned promotion expectations could lead a direct report to focus on the wrong thing, destroying your credibility and burning a lot of trust when the promotion doesn’t happen.

5. If you have not agreed on who does what around the house, someone will believe they are taking on an unfair share of the load and start to build resentment and frustration.

There are countless examples where believing something to be true but not communicating it will blow up in your face. This is insidious because the majority of the time, we believe we’ve communicated clearly. The full strategy is outside the scope of this article, but the primary solution here is ownership. Just because you say something out loud (or in writing) does not mean it was communicated.

Good luck!

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📖 What I'm reading

I am still reading The Millionaire Fastlane. I still remain skeptical that this will be at all useful, but we’ll see! There are a lot of good lessons in here, but nothing earth shattering so far. It does promote a very healthy mindset about money and valuing your time.

🏋️‍♀️ What I'm working on

(this is not a hack slide but ChatGPT is trying its best ;p)

I have three Dell Poweredge R610 servers I got a few years ago for cheap, but I haven’t really used them for anything. I built my own custom server rack out of construction lumber (2x4s and 2x6s) and a few 24U metal rack strips that the servers live in. My home server is a custom one I built out of ebay parts (Supermicro motherboard) that run Proxmox on, and I’ve always dreamed of adding the dell servers as nodes. Last night I finally started on this! I successfully installed proxmox on one of them. I can ping from the node, but nothing can ping it. “Destination Host Unreachable”. And if I try to ping “google.com” from the node it is unable to do so; so I’ll need to investigate and fix whatever networking configuration isn’t quite working. I’m excited to finally start this journey!

At the gym I was able to, for the first time ever, do full squats on the Hack Slide for all of my sets!!! I was shocked and super proud of myself. Usually I can do a few full reps and then I am doing partials to complete the set. It was a huge accomplishment and I am very excited to keep improving! I am trying my best not to become too obsessed with the gym and therefore burnout. My focus is still to build a consistent habit.

📈 State of the Newsletter

We’re at 53 subscribers as of writing. That’s pretty neat! Actually, it’s amazing!!! I talked about this in the intro, but again thank you for your readership and I hope you get value! My current goal is not numbers based, but to start publishing one-off articles. I have about 30 in flight right now, but 0 have been published. Let’s try to change that soon!