Leady Kindly by Controlling Your Response
11th edition
Welcome to Lead Kindly! I'd love to get to know you better to tailor 'Lead Kindly' to your interests and help ease your pain. Please fill out this quick form, or feel free to message me directly or leave a comment—whatever suits you best!
📚 Read This Week
Are you credible? Have you taken ownership? Ask yourself this question often by
Before you point fingers and assign blame, have you done everything possible to hold yourself accountable? Have you taken ownership of the space? Have you made the environment better for everyone? Have you exhausted all resources to fix the problem?
Are you someone who deserves credibility? Can others rely on you, both in their presence and absence? Do you consistently do the right thing, even when no one's watching?
For developers. You don’t earn trust by explaining complex terms to non-technical stakeholders. You build trust by taking ownership and proving that you get things done. By your actions. Your non-technical stakeholders don’t need to understand you; they need to trust you.
Kobayashi Maru Management by
As a kid I watched quite a bit of Star Trek with my dad, so this article hits a soft spot and was fun to read. Here are my takeaways:
Preventive Measures: We can’t just react to crises, we must try to prevent them.
Feedback: Obtain early feedback from 3 trusted sources who are not part of the impacted situation/group.
Growth Mindset: Even in no-win scenarios, the key is to learn from these experiences to better handle/prevent future crises.
Leadership and Responsibility: Good leadership is demonstrated not when things go wrong and reactive measures are taken, but when potential issues are forestalled through competent management.
Your Reward is silence. “No one celebrates when nothing happens”.
Learn To Rest by
This was a nice treat to get in my inbox, and a good reminder. Make sure to take time to rest. Here Csaba describes 7 different types of rest you can take and invites us all to try a new form of rest this week. Right now I am taking a sensory rest, as one of eight in this house, it is my sons birthday and excitement is high. I am taking 30 minutes of silence in my office and taking time to whatever I want; in this moment, that’s writing.
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
Batch your tasks, let your emails sit.
If you answer emails as they fly into your inbox, you are leaving productivity on the table.
If your job allows, avoid checking emails as they arrive. I found that closing my Gmail tab and checking emails intentionally increased my productivity significantly.
I was no longer distracted checking the tab to see if emails came in (or worse getting a notification every time an email arrived). I was able to focus more on what mattered.
As an engineering manager I felt I had to be super responsive to everyone, but over time I have learned that I can sacrifice responsiveness for throughput.
The time it takes me to go through 50 emails all at once, is much less than if I did them 1 at a time between other tasks. A lot of my emails are informational, so going through and taking notes for 15 emails is way better than having to take notes 15 separate times throughout the week.
The real truth is that I checked my email to slack off.
The procrastination part of my brain wanted an easy win. Delete an email? Feels like progress. Respond to someone? Feels like progress. But is it really? Almost never. I was letting my brain take the easy dopamine by “processing email”, when I had real tasks on my plate I needed to get done. No more.
Those 30 minutes between 1:1s are my time to get my real work done, not check emails.
💡 Quote of the Week
I can't control the other person's behavior, but I can control my response.
Their actions may be rude or unacceptable, but I still want my response to be measured and thoughtful. Even if they aren't doing what is right, I still want to make sure I'm doing what is right.
James Clear
It was a Friday after a very long week. A few long months... I was in a meeting with another leader, and something in them snapped.
They were beyond stressed and started ranting. A lot. With about a dozen other folks in the meeting, they had a lot to say about where I was failing as a leader, what I had done wrong, and why things were not going the way they wanted them to.
I had two people reach out afterward. They both apologized on behalf of this person and gave their support, but the engineering manager was a bit more candid. “How did you keep your cool? Two minutes in I would have lost it on them!”
I’m not always level headed. In my personal relationships especially I am more likely to boil over (I’m working on it) when things get tense, but there was a lot at play here that helped:
First, I understood the pressure we were all under. I met with this person 1:1 weekly, and I know their personal hardships and work responsibilities that were weighing on them. While their words seemed to be about me, it was only 5-10% about me.
Second, this heated moment was not the time to respond. They were not interested in listening. Instead I listened with intense curiosity to understand their position. I needed to collect data. I took notes during the rant, and asked more questions. I even asked them to pause at one point so I could write down a thought and then let them continue. This sent a strong signal: I am genuinely attentive to what you have to say.
Third, they were missing a lot of context. Like a lot a lot. This means that beside all the stress, any accusations of my character or my team said more about them than me. I understood deeply what the team was doing, why things were delayed, why the results were the way they were, etc. I was confident that once this person was in listening mode, we could clear up the misunderstandings.
There were some good lessons for us as well; how else could we have helped make sure the context was understood outside of the team? Even if the content of what this person was saying was untrue, it didn’t take away from the fact that this was a goldmine of learning.
I had no authority over this person. They were a leader in another realm, and while I had influence there, it wasn’t my responsibility to control their actions. I did what was in my purview and gathered data, so that later I could give appropriate feedback, and know how to move forward when the time was right. If things got too abusive, I would have ended the call and taken that risk, but I turned it into a learning opportunity for myself and the team.
The experience was a little embarrassing and I had to resist a lot of my impulses, which were to be angry and start yelling back. Especially when there were unfair claims about my team, I know how hard and effective they work.
Ultimately, by choosing to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively, I not only maintained professionalism but also turned a challenging situation into a learning opportunity for both myself and the team.
📖 What I'm reading
I finished Millionaire Fastlane. I think my rant from last time summarized it, so moving on!
I started reading Alex Hormozi’s first book, $100 Offer: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No. Making people feel stupid is not really Leading Kindly, but I’m about 1/3 through it already and I am really enjoying it. I’m very interested in business stuff right now so I’m chasing that. I feel a lot of connection between running a business and managing a team, which is just a small subset of a business. We’ll see if it’s helpful!
🏋️♀️ What I'm working on
ALL THE LIFTING. Well, mostly pushing and pulling. I don’t yet do deadlifts or anything like that. We’ll get there! I am starting to see a lot of physical evidence of progress which I did not expect so soon. Very likely Noob Gains? I don’t expect this rate of progress to continue, we only just finished our 19th romp at the gym but it’s nice to see so much improvement. My focus right now is on eating better, and I’m watching a lot of content on this and trying to adjust sustainably.
Here is where some of my research has landed:
Eat 4 meals a day.
Split my protein needs roughly evenly across all 4 meals. I use 0.82g/lb instead of 0.7g/lb (3 std deviations above minimum) because I seem to put on muscle easily. This may be total BS, but worse case I am getting too much protein and wasting a bit of money.
Getting more protein in one meal and less the next is fine. I’m not worrying much about protein timing at this stage.
Eat enough carbs and fats. I’m not sure how much this is yet, but mostly carbs and a bit of fat.
Try to make carb intake as healthy as possible. Veggies veggies veggies some fruit some rice etc.
Less Doritos, though still some Doritos.
Eat enough food to feel energized for a workout.
Eat enough carbs after a workout where my body won’t steal all my protein to restore energy.
Eat within 2 hours after a workout.
Get a lot of sleep.
If I have trouble sleeping, adjust when I eat food to see what works for me. I don’t want a burst of energy right when I hit the pillow.
📈 State of the Newsletter
We’re at 65 subscribers as of writing. That’s pretty neat! If you’d like to help support this publication, tell me about yourself!
I enjoy your weekly briefs. Thanks Coltin!
This is an excellent approach to maintaining calmness in tense situations. I think of it as a fire, where you decide whether to douse it with water (a calm response) or to pour on petrol (a heated response).