/Leadership

Categories Of Leadership On Technical Teams

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful. 

featured in #602

Categories Of Leadership On Technical Teams

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful. 

featured in #601

Operational Mechanisms For Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: “I refer to the art of making policies work as “operations” or “strategy operations.” The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoiding common practices that simply don’t work. The other one-third takes some practice, but can be practiced in any engineering role: there’s no need to wait until you’re an executive to start building mastery. This chapter will dig into those mechanisms.”

featured in #601

How I’ve Run Major Projects

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.” Ben describes his playbook. 

featured in #601

How I’ve Run Major Projects

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.” Ben describes his playbook. 

featured in #600

How To Praise

- Péter Szász tl;dr: “Construct your positive feedback the same way as you would a negative one. Ensure the situation where the action you want to comment on was well understood; focus on the actions of the person you’re giving a feedback to; and show the impact these behaviors had on you and others. This approach will help your team members recognize and build on their strengths.” Peter shares his framework for doing so. 

featured in #600

Applied "Software Engineering at Google"

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: “Google's software engineering practices have evolved to manage our large scale. However, the underlying principles driving these practices are valuable and transferable to organizations of any size. This isn't about blindly copying Google, but about understanding the why behind their methods and adapting the what to your context.”

featured in #600

Rigorous Thinking: No Lazy Thinking

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “Rigorous thinking is asking critical questions about tactics, and having a systematic way of making decisions. It isn’t a single mental model. It’s an approach to problem solving that allows you to deconstruct ideas, gain clarity, and make decisions that are far more likely to be right.” Wes shares her playbook for leaders here. 

featured in #599

The 10 Biggest Leadership Blindspots Based On 10 Years of Research

- Claire Lew tl;dr: Claire shares blindspots, self-assessment questions and actions to remedy each. Blindspots are:(1) What our team doesn't know doesn't hurt them. (2) Everyone should share my sense of urgency. (3) As long as my team likes me, they trust me. (4) I don't play favorites with my team. (5) I treat everyone the way that I want to be treated. And more. 

featured in #598

How Not To Disagree

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don’t agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?”

featured in #598