AR3

Every tactic… Has a strategy behind it. Often unsaid, undiscussed and hidden. It's easier to simply play with the tactic of the moment. Tell me what your tactic is trying to accomplish and I'll be halfway to understanding what your strategy is. But it makes a lot more sense to announce your strategy first, and then invite your team to invent tactics that make it work.

Every tactic…

Has a strategy behind it. Often unsaid, undiscussed and hidden. It's easier to simply play with the tactic of the moment. Tell me what your tactic is trying to accomplish and I'll be halfway to understanding what your strategy is. But it makes a lot more sense to announce your…

Votes are in, from a 48-hour “X” poll.

While we can surely agree we want to Make America Great Again. To achieve that goal, looks like we need to Make America Smart. But first, we need to Make Lying Wrong Again.

I outright reject him now, but I’m not embarrassed I looked up to him before

He was fighting for what I believe is right

I’m proud of us for recognizing his bullshit & changing our minds

He used to stand for something & us still striving for those ideals w/o him cements our integrity 💪🏾

I struggle with this.

I aspire to give autonomy so that we can skip to engagement. Because engagement is so fun and fulfilling.

But I’ve learned you can’t skip enrollment… Or you risk the transformation taking an order of magnitude longer, if ever.

Delicate balance though
bsky.app/profile/ar3....

A Garden for your Thoughts • note.garden

I use note.garden in a similar way.

How might we encourage “D” behavior?

• It can’t be just hiring, right?
• It can’t be just autonomy/agency, right?
• It can’t be just psych safety and systems that make D apparent and rewards it, right?

How might we create “Leave It Better” environments 🤔
medium.com/unfading-pur...

I get frustrated a tiny bit and then I try and formulate a backstory for those not in group D.

It gives me the opportunity to showcase my D-ness when others employ, A, B, or C #silver-lining 😂

The Way I Am Eminem · The Marshall Mathers LP · Song · 2000

Songs are powerful when they tell a story. When they are the manifestation of the cacophony of emotions we have to traverse as humans

My vibe today will resonate with leaders that have to make chaotic good style decisions

“The Way I Am”: open.spotify.com/track/23wfXw...

But DONT’T “Lose yourself”

…2/n

Is there any place that is truly a safe place where you can lay down your masks & truly just be your messy self?

@georgeroots.bsky.social and I discuss this on the latest recording of our weekly chat we call “Audacity to be Different”

Before we release that convo,I’m curious of your thoughts

Ever said something to a manager… vented… and then that thing shows up as a knock against you on your performance review?

What does that encounter do to your willingness to share other things in the future?

1/n

When I worked for a learning management system, we called them learners and instructors.

I now work for an applicant tracking system and we call them job seekers => applicants => interviewees => new hires => employees (depending on their status) & hiring managers, interviewers, and managers

Being on a team that is moving fast and getting shit done is one of the best feelings in the world.

As my coworker @gsiener.bsky.social says... it's not "happy engineers ship fast"; it's that engineers who ship fast ARE HAPPY ENGINEERS.

It's not the whole story, but it's a lot of it. ☺️

Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around…

If a manager's direct reports are always happy with them, I guarantee you they are not really doing their job. 🙃

Messy, uncomfortable feelings are part of doing hard things and learning and growing.

I've written about this a bunch of places, like here.. 👇

charity.wtf/2024/01/05/q...

Psychological safety is NOT about lack of disagreement.

Psychological safety REQUIRES:

* disagreement and debate
* setting standards for behavior and performance, and enforcing them
* telling people things they don't want to hear
* courage, from the bottom up
* humility, from the top down

Accountability

Accountability should be fair.
Accountability should be specific.
Accountability should be unsurprising.

This gets a little murky as you progress in your career or when you are talking about values.

However regardless we should be aiming for the accountability big 3

This.

So much could be solved with an unfading focus on outcomes.

Hard, and easy to forget/let slide… but critical nonetheless!

I have an eerily similar story, where @mileszs.bsky.social basically said the same thing.

I actually think the quote was “ohh shit, you didn’t know? Yours is way more intense than mine so I thought you knew and we would be able to compare notes” 😂😂😂

Love having people like this in our lives!!

Sounds like SLOs, right @charity.wtf ?

Maybe we should bring the concept of SLO to the non-engineering world. Could that make it all better?

Well let’s start within the product world. We are exploring design debt SLOs… I’ll report back how it goes.

…3/n

When a work relationship has been mortally wounded, all you can do is establish the new normal mode of interaction & rely on the systems out in place to heal the trust over time.

It takes one thing, one second to demolish trust. It takes much effort to rebuild it.

No quick fixes. Do the work

…2/n

1. Acknowledge the broken trust

2. Restate the intolerance of inadequate/unshared feedback

3. Create (ideally temporary) systems to force the feedback to be “good”

—

The hard part is the fact that the relationships may be forever hurt…

Inadequate/unshared feedback leads to a growing collection of toxic judgments

A narrative of toxic judgments left unattended lead to Resentment—

—which leads to near unrepairable relationships—

—which leads to a toxic culture

How do we fix this spiral of despair?

This is my favorite thing about bsky too!!! Outside of the community 💪🏾💪🏾

Genius way to validate!!

🫶🏾

Captain America : Brave New World

10/10 would recommend 💪🏾🫶🏾

I’m biased of course, but 🤷🏾‍♂️😂

Finished Falcon and the Winter Soldier because we are on the way to see Captain America 💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾

… And I really love the slogan for the antagonists of that show…

One World, One People ✊🏾

I know it is true… but damn it is hard.

Dumb, inconsiderate, willfully ignorant, lazy bullshit just gets deep under my skin. Raging just feels good… but is mostly ineffective and just not who I aspire to be.

I know, I know… wooo sah 😂🫶🏾

I love this!

We have Labs in our app. Built it because there is tremendous resistance to launching at the company & we needed a way to understand faster and with less gate keeping.

Some still think it is just a staging area of an inevitable launch. These folks don’t get that it is a learning tool

…8/n

To those who I was too much of a coward and withheld this gift of “real” from (and it is more than I care to admit).

I sincerely, deeply apologize. I will work to never do that again.

Which means you won’t always like me… but I hope we can grow together 🫶🏾