I’ve been working with the rad team at Fly.io for the past few months as a fractional VPE, mainly focusing on management-y and culture stuff as the team grows. One of the things I really dig about Fly.io’s company culture is how teammates use their internal forum for sharing questions about work, project progress updates, oncall recaps, and other stuff that I’ve traditionally seen live (and die) in email inboxes. I’m finding that the internal forum helps keep conversations going async (and out of Slack, which can be super lossy for folks in different timezones) and a little bit more evergreen ..read more

We face decisions every single day, big and small. Sometimes those decisions have tradeoffs that feel impossible to decide between, which naturally will feel particularly hard to settle on. For example, let’s say you’ve been struggling to enjoy your current role at work, and you’re ready to make a decision about how to address that. You’re feeling some stress about the volume of work you need to get done every week, but you also recognize that you don’t have relationships or strong connections with your colleagues. If you prioritize feeling more connected, you’ll have less time to check things ..read more

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the energy of the room was off—and that feeling affected you, even if it was super s ..read more

Congrats, you’ve made it through your first 2 months as a new hire in a leadership role! You’re in the home stretch of this initial season. You took advantage of the first 30 days in the role to build trust by employing “sponge mode.” You asked lots of questions, genuinely listened to your teammates’ answers, and avoided enacting any sweeping, permanent changes to the way work gets done. Then you leveraged what you learned during those first 30 days by announcing and running two experiments for change. These experiments were born of the concerns you heard that were most important to folks on t ..read more

Woohoo, you’ve made it through the first 30 days in your new leadership role, and you didn’t change a thing! Congrats—you’ve been building trust by soaking in information and helping folks on your team feel heard and seen. At this stage, you now have some ideas for how your teams accomplish and communicate their work, what the roadmap looks like, how performance is assessed, and a number of other things that you want to implement. But wait—before enacting any lasting change, it’s crucial to connect the dots between your ideas for change, and the themes you heard from your new teammates during ..read more

You’ve started in a new role: congrats! Throughout my years as a coach, I’ve seen lots of my clients land in a new leadership role as a director or above, and make a well-intentioned but enormous mistake: they make a big change within their organization before building up trust with their teams. I’m eager to help you avoid this classic pitfall! Let’s break it down into how you should think about enacting change in your first 30, 60, and 90 days as a senior leader. First 30 days: sponge mode We’re calling your first 30 days “sponge mode” because your primary job during this period is to soak up ..read more

An attendee from one of my Delivering Feedback workshops asked: I think the Feedback Equation we learned today could work well with my manager, but I’m concerned about implementing it. One of my biggest fears about giving them feedback is their negative response to it, so tying it back to what’s important to him makes a lot of sense to me. However, how would I use coaching/open questions without getting salty that I have to coach them through the situation? I don’t have power in the relationship and that makes me worried about how I will handle it if and when my manager gets negative. Ooh, y ..read more

This post originally appeared on Lead Dev. When an employee notifies you that they’re quitting, you might feel a range of emotions. Maybe you’re surprised and sad. Maybe you’re unsurprised and glad. Maybe you’re all four at once. Maybe you’re dreading what comes next: telling the team, finding their replacement, navigating headcount budgets. When you find yourself in this moment—no matter how you feel—it will benefit you in the end to take a step back and consider how you want to navigate this change. Even if your gut response is to try to negotiate with your employee to get them to stay, or t ..read more

This post originally appeared on Lead Dev. If you’ve just made it through the toughest part of performance review season, congratulations! You’ve delivered fair, motivating, and unsurprising feedback and helped your teammates crystalize their path forward. Congrats! But there’s one more thing to do before you call this performance season a wrap. If you’ve promoted a teammate, or someone on your team has a new title or role, now is the time to announce it. Promotion announcements are a great way to equitably recognize someone’s hard work, and they’re also an opportunity for managers to highligh ..read more

Back in 2017, I wrote an article about desk moves, and the surprising emotions we might see from our coworkers when a desk move is announced. In that post, I used Paloma Medina’s brilliant BICEPS framework to illustrate how each person might respond really differently to a big, surprising change like a desk move. When any of the six core needs in BICEPS are threatened, our amygdala might kick off our fight or flight response, which can cause friction and chaos for us and those around us. While desk moves haven’t been as common in the last few years of pandemic life, there has been one constant ..read more