teams
Leadership, management, and building as a team.
@pauldowman.eth
I don't want well-rounded people. I want people who are amazing at something the team needs. It's great if they have other attributes too, but not at the expense of the primary one.
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@pauldowman.eth
Alright /teams... a recurring topic around here. Thoughts?
https://x.com/ChShersh/status/1816514954302025820
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@pauldowman.eth
“Effective managers hand books to their team. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, ‘are we there yet?’”
https://seths.blog/2008/05/how-to-read-a-b/
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@pauldowman.eth
“early-career employees are a cheap call option on talent that's expensive to acquire later. When hiring slows down, that variance compresses, and the option value of the early hires takes a big hit.”
https://www.thediff.co/archive/the-supply-chain-of-talent/
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@pauldowman.eth
“The difference between a grinder and a lazy person is only 3x — a grinder might work 100 hours/week versus a mere 30 hours for an oaf. Yet we routinely see people who are 100x or 1000x more productive than others. How?”
https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/10x-work-versus-1x-work
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@pauldowman.eth
Kent Beck on the documentation tradeoff. Good stuff
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-documentation-tradeoff
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@pauldowman.eth
“The paradox is that in an effort to do more, we end up doing less.”
https://fs.blog/what-you-do-today-is-not-essential/
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@pauldowman.eth
“Don’t interrupt your team with surprise meetings or requests. Be intentional instead.”
https://newsletter.canopy.is/p/avoiding-surprise-requests
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@pauldowman.eth
Great post on managing high performers. Advice #1: manage them!
“Doing and coaching are two separate skills; you can help someone improve without being better than them”
https://blog.staysaasy.com/p/managing-high-performers
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@pauldowman.eth
“investing in R&D is a way to buy a sort of talent buffer: when business is good, researchers can focus on things that won't be practical for a decade, but when the business is threatened, there's a talent bench that can be redirected…”
https://capitalgains.thediff.co/p/moonshotsorbuybacks
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@pauldowman.eth
The accepted wisdom for how to keep people motivated is “autonomy, mastery and purpose”. But there’s a 4th thing: being surrounded by great people.
To keep “A players” motivated make sure they’re surrounded with only “A players”.
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@pauldowman.eth
“pushing your organization to improve is essential leadership work, but organizations can only absorb so much improvement at a given time before they reject the person providing the feedback”
https://lethain.com/constraints-on-giving-feedback/
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@pauldowman.eth
This is a decent list. I’ve read all except “From Worst to First” and “The Ride of a Lifetime”, and I’d recommend any of them
https://zaidesanton.substack.com/p/10-must-reads-for-engineering-leaders
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@pauldowman.eth
"If Jason and I are not revisiting 10% of the decisions made, we’re not delegating enough, we’re not delegating quickly enough."
(Also more on "disagree and commit" since I posted something else about that here recently.)
https://37signals.com/podcast/disagree-and-commit/
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