A podcast to help great coders become skilled leaders, and build happy, high-performing software teams.
Episodes
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest Esther Derby discuss change. They discuss her book, Seven Rules for Positive Productive Change, and how change is viewed and implemented by individuals and organizations.
Show Notes
- Change is a core aspect of leaders' and managers' jobs
- Change is viewed differently from different people, or different places in an organization
- How do people and companies "do change"?
- Codifying when we know the least
- Forest succession as a metaphor for change
- What holds the current pattern in place?
- Fundamental attribution error
- Missing feedback loop
- Possible for people to change, but don't always choose to
- Which details really matter?
- "Use Your Self"
- "Slow Ideas" by Atul Gawande
- Strive for congruence
Resources and Links:
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest Jason Wong discuss how one size does not fit all in leadership. They dive into how the traditional leadership model isn't working well and how it could be changed to become more effective. The two also enlighten listeners on a new followership model, and why followership can be just as important as leadership.
Show Notes
- The traditional leadership model isn't working well
- Great Man Leadership
- New model should be less confrontational and more collaborative
- Corporations aren't just money and investors, we need to incorporate values
- The Chef Incident
- We all seek leadership thus everyone is always following someone
- Chaleff Model of Followership
- Being a leader or a follower isn't a choice, sometimes you could be good at both
- Leadership model in which you pass the baton and take turns in the leadership role
- Soldier vs. Scout mentality
Resources and Links:
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Change is hard, unpredictable, and downright complex. Getting people or systems to change is not easy and certainly not done in a vacuum. In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest Don Gray enlighten listeners regarding the world of software development, the reasons for implementing software changes and why it's not as easy as people may think. And while doing so, the pair attempt to arm their readers with a variety of change literature that will have them thinking of containers, systems and exchanges in a whole new light.
Show Notes
- Change is complex
- Reasons for change - need for improvement, conformance, changeability
- Software development is not linear and not deterministic
- A software change is invisible and not physical so it is rather difficult to visualize
- Prediction of how things will work is difficult
- Retrospective Coherence - looking backwards after a change has been made
- Thinking in Systems - people don't tend to think in systems
- Containers hold focus
- People notice events and plot those events to see trends
Resources and Links:
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
On today's episode of Programming Leadership, we dive into what is needed to establish safety in your own organization. Trust is just one of the key pieces that make up the structure of safety in a work environment, along with actual physical measures, active communication, and regular feedback. The people who make up your organization are an integral part of the safety structure. An exchange of ideas and criticisms between subordinates and superiors should be shared, but boundaries must be in place and commonly known in order for these exchanges to occur safely and effectively. Utilizing all of these components, managers can provide a safe environment for their employees to help limit catastrophes from occurring whether in the workplace or in the actual work itself.
Show Notes
- Safety is defined by the measures put in place to prevent small problems from turning into big ones, but those are not limited to merely physical measures.
- A feeling of safety in the work environment is just as important and necessary to an end product as a software test suite.
- Communication involves listening without assumption and questioning with intent so that decisions can be made with the correct desired outcome.
- Good intentions and taking risks can be seen as good or bad, depending on who's calling the shots. The reality is - there is no universal safety net.
- Trust can be broken, but it's also negotiable. Be willing to admit when too much is too much, and ask for help when you need it rather than take on more than you can handle and risk losing trust altogether.
- Learn to recognize a person's limits, and learn to recognize when those limits need to be challenged or reassessed and raised.
- Jobs evolve just like people. Evaluating a person’s performance shouldn’t be just about how well someone does in the job they were hired to do. You have to look at how a person has adapted to their work environment and how they have changed it, for better or worse.
Resources and Links:
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Training, done properly, is a specialized type of learning that companies can use as an investment in their personnel or as a box that gets ticked off each year as mandatory practice. What are some of the best practices for training? How can employees prepare to learn?
Show Notes
- I think that good training and good learning go hand in hand
- Nowadays there's a whole host of different options for every technology.
- I think it's also healthy for an organization to say, "We're investing in you. We want you to learn these things even if there's no immediate payoff, even if it's not directly for like helping the company right now, we think that at some point in the next year you're going to be exposed to this. You'll need this, you'll want this."
- having these fundamentals really helps you sort of fly through the system and then use it for the purpose you want, which is getting your work done and not spending time on the nonsense.
- every company has to sort of decide on these trade-offs because during those days people won't be available as much as you want and you just have to sort of plan for that
Links:
- Learn More About Reuven:
- Website: lerner.co.il
- Online Store: store.lerner.co.il
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/reuvenlerner
- O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference – Berlin, Germany. November 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages.
Thursday Sep 26, 2019
Thursday Sep 26, 2019
When you as the manager treat your peers, other managers in the organizations as your first team, it changes your stance. It changes the way you work. It creates intentionally a set of allies you can problem-solve, people problem-solve with, people you can collaborate with. This is a little bit different idea than my first team of the people that work for me. Instead, your first team becomes those other engineering managers, directors, VPs, whatever it is, those peers, those all-important peer relationships that are so, so vital to cross-team, cross-silo and cross-departmental work.
Show Notes
- What is a “first team”?
- I got trained in a cohort of people that went through together, and that became my first team
- Creating a unified management team
- There was also really something special about the way my boss created and improved the relationships with the people that he led through the program.
- if we go back to the past and we see where companies put people through their own leadership development programs
Links:
- O’Reilly Velocity Conference - Berlin, Germany. September 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages.
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Does project work feel like a guessing game? What happens when projects go off track, and how can this affect customer relationships? Better yet, how can we navigate uncertainty when we estimate and plan -- but things still go wrong? Standing in uncertainty, learning to handle it, and living in inquiry are topics of discussion in this episode.
Show Notes
- We're going to talk about the idea of being able to hold uncertainty in our mind, start to get comfortable with it, and some mental tools and patterns of how to handle
- When we find ourselves uncertain, we oftentimes crave certainty.
- Be comfortable holding your plans with an element of uncertainty.
- It's really easy for you as a manager to observe generally how people are working.
- Product management and prioritization are all about cutting away, they're all about subtracting
- I'm going to propose that you get into a habit and create a practice of reestimating and replanning.
- I want to focus on this very simple three part steps to something that Human Systems Dynamics calls an adaptive action.
- standing in uncertainty, learning to handle uncertainty, living in inquiry
Links:
- Sponsor: GitPrime
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
At Stripe, guest Will Larson received his first official management training by an employer. It taught him about different management styles, problem solving, and more. But most employees don’t get management training, which can cause problems down the road. Marcus and Will discuss this, plus what it takes to handle leadership roles.
Show Notes
- Most coders don’t aspire to be managers
- “there's that idea that really if you think about the consequences and the kind of statefulness of these human systems that you're working with, you can come to understand them in a way that you can't if you look at them as causal”
- “this is where systems thinking is so powerful, which is if you look at it causally you've solved a problem, if you look at it from a systems perspective you've created a problem, and you really have to have the slightly longer term view and just to recognize that you are burying yourself when you take many of the quick easy ways out”
- “the joy of senior manager is these problems are really hard to solve but you actually can finesse most problems into like a problem statement where everyone like is happy”
- “So I've been thinking about the idea of forced change a lot recently.”
- “A lot of incident programs have the same problem where they learn about the gaps but then you have to find the space to improve upon them”
- We’re still learning: Most Silicon Valley companies are still very young
- “There's still a ton of scarcity for kind of the folks at the top of the market.”
Links:
- O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference – Berlin, Germany. November 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages.
- Will Larson on Twitter
- Will’s book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Thursday Sep 05, 2019
Thursday Sep 05, 2019
If a friend asks you to help them move something heavy, like a rock, you probably wouldn’t think twice. But if they asked you to take care of their pet monkey… That’s the beginning of our chat with Matt Greenberg, Vice President of Engineering at Credit Karma, who compares problems of various types and sizes to monkeys and rocks. The goal of effective leaders should be to break down bigger problems into smaller ones, going from monkey-sized problems to smaller, rock-sized ones.
Show Notes
- Framing problems as monkeys -- vs rocks
- It's not easy once a problem has become a monkey, to shape it back down into a rock.
- It might be something like choosing a programming language for a specific problem.
- what you're ultimately trying to do is build teams of Michael Jordan's, so that they can do huge impact things, but that they're easy for them
- I see most of the challenges with my teams are when people don't have the empathy to see the state from other people's point of view
Links:
- O’Reilly Velocity Conference - Berlin, Germany. September 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages.
- Credit Karma
- Matt Greenberg on LinkedIn
- Matt Greenberg on Twitter: @matt_muffin
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
The only constant is change, and Heidi Helfand knows a thing or two about changes in organizations. From reteamining to reorganizations to just shuffling a member or two, in this episode we’ll learn how to think about these inevitable changes and what to do when they happen.
Show Notes
- What are some of the kinds of change that a team might undergo?
- Dynamic reteaming comes in these five structural patterns
- The metaphor of the eco-cycle
- Different types of mentoring
- What does it mean to have a “successful” team?
- Inner and outer roles
- A recipe for disengagement
Links:
- Heidihelfand.com
- Book: Dynamic Reteaming
- Twitter: @heidihelfand
- Sponsor: GitPrime