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“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.””Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” When you’re surrounded by uncertainty, rituals like project planning or resource planning may feel pointless. And it may not matter whether the ambiguity around you is caused by a legitimately unpredictable environment driven by financial, political, or regulatory upheaval or whether it’s…
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If somebody inherited your calendar, what kind of organization would they end up running? I can hear some of you now. “What kind of question is that?” But seriously. How you manage your calendar shapes your organization more than you might think. It both reflects and influences how proactive or reactive you and your team…
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You have a brilliant senior engineer on your team, and you’re encouraging them to pursue promotion along a technical track instead of a management track because, well, they’re not that great with people. Warning! That can be just as big a disaster as moving them into management. Sure, there are plenty of good reasons an…
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In formal status updates, retrospectives, or after-action reviews, your team members will almost never report feeling fear or experiencing unspoken conflict. But those triggers, along with the ambiguity that’s often part of the same cycle, are often early warnings for a failing team. As a manger, you may think the team looks healthy — the…
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Engineers who become managers quickly find that the authority that comes with the manager title isn’t as helpful as they thought it would be. First, even when you have the role power as the boss to tell your team what to do, the effectiveness of that power diminishes the more often you have to use…
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As you develop your leadership and management skills, eventually you’ll probably be asked to take some sort of standardized assessment. You’ll also likely run across someone who suggests that you have your team take one as well. But are these assessments helpful or harmful? Well … they can be either. I tend to classify them…
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As a leader with an engineering background, you may have a skill in pattern recognition that helps you troubleshoot and resolve technical problems. When you see a certain failure mode, you know that it’s generally triggered by a small handful of possible causes. If we’re not careful, though, that pattern recognition that was once a…
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Silence is data, and most people either don’t notice it or misinterpret it. Silence can be seen as apathy, ignorance, or resistance, and it’s easy for our personal biases to prompt us to jump to a quick conclusion. But the data of silence may be telling a very different story, and when your track record…
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Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. If you’ve been in engineering leadership for any length of time, you understand that our field has a long history of bad metric targets that have driven engineers to find creative and unproductive ways to game the system. At the same…
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I’ve mentioned in the past how emphasizing Mean Time To Resolution over Mean Time Between Failures can be just as effective in human relationships as it is in computer operations engineering. When I think about it, I see that there are many other engineering principles that can serve as insightful metaphors for human system designs…
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“If you want something done, ask a busy person.” If all you care about is one single task, then that common wisdom might be good advice. But if you make it a habit or build a system around that strategy, some day it will crumble. A similar danger shows up when your team has a…
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I don’t hear the phrase “quiet quitting” as much as I used to. Maybe it’s not as trendy to use those words as it once was. But managers still face the challenge of inspiring team members to give what has long been called “discretionary effort.” Especially when you personally believe in the mission of the…
Musings
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