Lead Kindly Evolves!

Writing will take center stage!

I’ve been writing this newsletter weekly for 14 weeks now and I am so happy with that commitment. I’ve learned a ton about myself, and met a bunch of really great inspiring leaders!

My original goal was to force myself to read more articles by starting a publication where I hold myself to sharing what I learn every single week. And it worked! But that’s not my goal anymore.

My goal now is to write.

I will continue reading articles and sharing those as substack notes (and LinkedIn probably). I’ll still be sharing my thoughts on articles, but now as I read them and have something worth saying.

I have 30 drafts in flight, but until now my writing time was spent on the weekly quotes, productivity tips, etc. Instead I will focus my writing time turning these into articles, adding to the content instead of re-summarizing other peoples work.

Here are a few. These are the raw ideas, not how they would be marketed:

• The first time I missed being a Software Engineer since becoming a manager (recent hackathon experience).

• A slew of articles about psychological safety.

• Nice vs Kind Eng Leadership

• My personal Management Philosophies

• Yet Another Definitive Guide to Overcoming Imposter Syndrome (this one I want to write because I’m passionate about it, not because I think there aren’t resources)

• How to abandon your team for longer periods of time (take time off, be sick, etc)

• How to know if you should become an engineering manager

• Using Notion as an Engineering Manager

• Good Reasons to Micromanage (thanks

  Niall
  and
  Anton Zaides
  for this idea)

• How to Leverage LLMs and other machine learning tools as an EM (this could honestly be dozens of articles)

With this change I will also no longer be pushing for articles on a particular schedule (yet). I am going to hold myself to a writing habit, but not a publication timeline. I am very aware this is the death knell of most YouTube channels and blogs, but I am confident after 14 weeks of success that I will make it through. Consistency is king!

I hope you will find these changes valuable, let’s go!