#33 - Intentional Technical Leadership

Hey my friend!

Happy Saturday! 🎉

Welcome to another issue of the Intentional Technical Leadership newsletter.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and anyone else who celebrates it! 🦃

I hope you've had a wonderful week and are looking forward to a relaxing weekend.

This week I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking about how we can iterate on our team processes to make them more effective. I'm not the biggest advocate of strict agile ways of working but sometimes you need to lean into something to get started.

Here are this week's articles. Enjoy!

🔖 Interesting Reading

What to do when a beloved employee quits

It's often a sad day when an employee tells you they're leaving your team.

It can be tough for the employee to leave and as their manager, you may be going through a mix of emotions too.

This article from Lara Hogan provides a great framework for how to handle the situation and how to ensure the best experience for both the employee and the team. In it you'll learn how to handle the situation, how to communicate with the team and wider business, and how to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible.

If you've ever had the unexpected "can we have a quick chat?" message from one of your team as they hand in their resignation, this is a great article to read. 😄

The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

When you work for a 100% remote company across different time zones, you need to be intentional about how you communicate and collaborate.

It's often hard to find time in people's calendars that works across Europe and the US. I'm based in the UK and I've found that my afternoons quickly become filled with meetings and 1:1s based on who I'm working with.

This article from Tremendous is a great read on how they've built a culture of documentation to enable asynchronous communication and fewer meetings.

It's interesting to read about how they get more work done and enable periods of deep work by reducing the number of meetings and being thoughtful in how they communicate. I'm definitely taking some notes from this article to see if I can enable better asynchronous ways of working with my team.

📺 Worth Watching

Getting to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses

This is a fantastic video from a group of senior engineering leaders taken from a recent LeadDev online conference.

In it they share how they get to know their teams and embrace and grow each team member's strengths, whilst being mindful of their weaknesses.

It's great to hear how other leaders approach this within their companies to ensure they find the best opportunities for personal growth and development. This is something I'm really keen to develop with anyone I manage.

It's always useful to map your team member's skills to the job description (assuming you have one!) and see where there are gaps. I like to use this to build up a list of potential training opportunities for each team member. This can also be helpful for identifying potential growth areas and to make sure their work is aligned with where they want to go.

Let me know what you think. How do you ensure you're growing your team members and helping them to develop their skills?

I hope you enjoyed this week's selection of intentional technical leadership articles.

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

Feel free to send me any interesting articles or podcasts you've found as I love hearing from my readers.

Have an amazing week and be excellent to each other!

Speak to you soon,
Marc

Senior Engineering Manager @ Netlify

👓 Read more of my technical leadership articles on my website.