Decision-making and leadership
The Blackmill book club recently finished reading Will Larson’s excellent book, The Engineering Executive’s Primer. I enjoyed it for a number of reasons and have already had reason to refer back to it. But one element I found difficult was the characterisation of leadership styles as different forms of decision-making. Policy, consensus, and conviction are all valid decision-making approaches that offer varying degrees of usefulness depending on the circumstances. But leadership is not just about how you make decisions. Nor is it simply having the authority to make decisions.
Leadership is many things, but in the context of making decisions, it is making a call that gets buy-in, that promotes follow-through, that is accepted, and that achieves something.
You need to be empowered to make the decision, and not be afraid of taking the fall. The first needs institutional support. The second being held to account if the decision goes poorly.
To make a good decision, it is important to gather the right people, to ask the right questions, to have the right context. You can't veto the team too often, because dictatorship will deflate the team. Many times, you need to get support from the wider team, to actually make the change stick. Hearing out perspectives and proposals lets people buy in and commit to the final outcome.
You can make any decision you want, or write it in a policy, but it doesn't mean people will follow through. Achieving the latter? That is leadership.
~ Lachlan
What’s happening?
We’re reverting to our old newsletter format and cadence. Expect to see us only once a month in future!
Nicola is speaking tomorrow
We know we want psychological safety and all the delicious goodness, connection and performance it brings. We intellectually understand how it is built and how quickly it can be destroyed.
At the next Tech Leading Ladies meetup, which is happening tomorrow, Nicola will be looking at a few simple, well-meaning ways in which we can inadvertently sabotage that trust, and talk about some strategies to turn it around.
Nicola's lightning talk will be a precursor to Sara Zabukovec's talk on The Power of Culture & Collaboration. Learn more and RSVP at https://www.meetup.com/tech-leading-ladies/events/303149055/
Tech Leader Chat September 26th AEST
How to build productive product and engineering teams
It's not always easy to know if your team is being productive. Are you prioritising the right things? How do you decide what to do first? These are questions that many product and engineering teams struggle with. Elle and Lachlan will lead a discussion for the Tech Leader Chat meetup about what being productive really means for teams. We’ll help the group think about:
What does being productive mean for our specific team?
How do we know we're focusing on the right tasks?
What metrics make the most sense for us to track?
How can we improve the way we work?
This is a public meetup group. Anyone is welcome to join. Find the details here: https://www.meetup.com/tech-leader-chats/events/303342780/
Leadership coaching
Let us support you to grow your capabilities, strengthen your skills, so you can overcome your current challenges and approach future ones with more confidence and resilience. With leadership coaching you will increase your effectiveness, and inspire engagement from everyone around you.
Our leadership coaching is typically one hour, delivered online, every two weeks. This lets you stay on top of your responsibilities, while being frequent enough to develop the skills you need to meet the challenges of the moment.
What are we reading?
The Asshole Filter — An asshole filter happens when one has a "set of norms which results in one primarily, or at least disproportionately, coming into contact with assholes." Almost a decade old now, and still as valid and interesting as when it was first published.
Make your health insurance company cry — An engineer in SF built Fight Health Insurance, an open-source platform that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI.
Staff engineer archetypes — Will Larson’s excellent Staff Engineer resource site offers some examples of the different roles staff engineers can play in your organisation.
Cultural Atlas — The SBS Cultural Atlas is an excellent resource that aims to inform and educate the public in cross-cultural attitudes, practices, norms, behaviours and communications. These cultural observations are contextualised with up-to-date statistics about Australia’s migrant populations and information on their trends of arrival and settlement.
How to Monetize a Blog — A tongue-in-cheek guide to making money on the interwebs.
A cuppa with Ted Tencza
1. What do you do? And what do you like about your work?
I run Code Purple Consulting. I do mentoring for several clients, from CTOs to newly minted Engineering Managers. I also provide consulting to engineering organisations around organisational excellence. This can range from hiring and interview programs and training, distributed team set up and operation, defining organisational career paths and promotions guidelines/criteria. My favourite part of my work is 1-1 mentoring. It gives me a chance to give back to an industry filled with people willing to help each other.
2. What aspect of your work do you find most challenging?
Getting new clients. A lot of companies that struggle in these areas also tend to place less importance on them, which is a big mistake.
3. What are you passionate about?
Working on those problems that many organisations don’t feel is important, yet they are. Bad interviewing, bad hiring, poor career path definitions, poor distributed team management can all be very costly in terms of both loss of revenue and more importantly loss of effective, productive engineers.
4. What are recent accomplishments you are happy with?
I was helping a client company interview for a Head of Engineering role. The best candidate was already on the team, and I was able to help convince the CTO that his current team member was head and shoulders above the external candidate. The new Head of Engineers is a member of an Under Represented Group, which made it even more satisfying.
5. What is one mistake that you will never make again?
Over-indexing on people’s prior companies while interviewing. Having worked at a FAANG doesn’t automatically make someone a good engineer. Having just worked at a bank doesn’t make someone a bad engineer. As a leader, it is vital to interview and understand the person, not the resume.
6. How do you manage stress?
Walking and fresh air. Just getting out from behind my desk and taking a walk around the block really helps clear my mind and gives me the ability to focus on whatever task in on hand.
7. What is the best advice you can give?
Never stop learning. The career I had in web development didn’t exist when I was in high school. The technologies we use today didn’t exist when I wrote my first line of production code in 1997. If you stop learning, you will be left behind.
8. What one thing would you change about our society?
I would love it if society would adopt a code of conduct like there are now at tech conferences. And then follow it.
9. What are your goals or aspirations for this year?
To build Code Purple Consulting into a sustainable business, while enjoying my new life in Tasmania.
What are we cooking?
Texas-style BBQ
Ted loves Texas style BBQ — especially 12-14 hour brisket.
Ingredients
Dry Rub
1 cup brown sugar
To taste: Salt, pepper, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder and cayenne.
BBQ Sauce
1 cup ketchup
1 cup brown sugar
1 Tbsp liquid smoke
1 Tbsp molasses
1 Tsp apple cider vinegar (or balsamic vinegar or cherry vinegar)
Add in same spices as in the dry rub. Cook on low heat for 20 minutes, until flavours meld.
Instructions
Get a nice brisket from butcher, coat with dry rub, and smoke over cherry or mesquite wood. Wrap in foil for last 2 hours. Remove when internal temp hits 90C. Let rest at least 30 minutes after coming off the heat. Serve with home made BBQ sauce.
And we’re out
Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.
Until next time, keep learning!
Everyone at Blackmill