Authority Issues

Authority Issues

By Rachel Perkins and Kendall MillerBusinessCareersManagement
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Authority Issues episodes

  • Episode 30: Nadyne Richmond (Grand Rounds)

    In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Nadyne talk about:

    • An early career transition from software engineering to user research via human factors training
    • Equipping sharks with lasers
    • How weird it was to work on a military base as a civillian and not be the lunch lady
    • Arriving in the SF Bay Area just as the first dot com bubble burst
    • How it's easier to communicate concerns when there is a framework for it
    • Doing the job AND talking about the job
    • A high school paramedic?!
    • Looking into the eyes of it (American healthcare)
    • The difference between being trained how to use management tools vs how to actually manage
    • How to handle it when someone is intimidated by you: be more personal (and vulnerable)
    • Giving your team opportunities to build leadership skills by allowing them to support you when you need it
    • Going to all kinds of live shows and why that's awesome
    • Kendall's penchant for ruining things

      • You can find Nadyne on Twitter and Instagram as @nadyne :)

      Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

      48 min
    • Episode 29: Anthony Jules (Robust.ai)

      In this episode, Kendall, rachel, and Anthony talk about:

      • Feeling the need to run a business
      • Blowing your life up every few years
      • The need to evolve communication processes as a company scales
      • Hiring pipeline planning for the longer-term
      • Recommended communication practices at various points of scale
      • The importance of perceiving someone's weaknesses as well as their strengths
      • The inspiration of making things, building machines--which can be organizations
      • Questions to ask yourself when deciding whether to take a job
      • The endless struggle of balancing learning vs doing, achieving stress homeostasis
      • Being able to make decisions across a large scope of influence with limited knowledge
      • Broader definitions of leadership
      • Allowing yourself to be vulnerable as a leader opens up greater possibilities of trust
      • The role of understanding your motivations
      • Drones!

        • You can find Anthony on the internet at LinkedIn under "Anthony Jules" :)

        Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

        52 min
      • Episode 28: Nik Knight (UK fintech)

        In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Nik talk about:

        • How much it sucks to be a recruiter
        • Finding out the hard way just how much your boss does that you don't know about
        • The Dark Times, aka the Trial By Fire
        • Resisting the call to management
        • Growing through 1:1 coaching
        • The realization that a leader doesn't have to know everything
        • Pivoting the industry toward culture change
        • What Release Management means
        • Not putting off the hard conversations
        • It's not paranoia if people really are out to get you
        • Managing managers often means teaching them how to manage
        • Showing your human side as a leader, but not making it about you
        • Having a healthy disrespect for authority

          • You can find Niks on Twitter at @kninki, and on LinkedIn as Nicola Knight.

          Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

          47 min
        • Episode 27: Christine Ramirez (Kapost)

          In this episode, Kendall, rachel, and Christine talk about:

          • You can get paid to do this? Turning an avatar design hobby into a graphic design career
          • Disrupting Wall Street marketing
          • Not choosing engineering
          • Being The One Who Says It
          • Learning to think about the goal before Saying It and passing that knowledge on
          • The difference between showing your passion in your arguments vs showing up for your team
          • How the ability to communicate with words is underrated in the design world
          • Being uncomfortable when there are unstated concerns
          • Difficulties with having faith
          • How leveling up means...more questions
          • Frustrations with directional flow of information
          • The awkwardness of managing people who used to be your peers
          • Christine's recommendation for Design Department's Design Leadership Fundamentals workshop
          • Christine's recommendation for the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

            • You can find Christine on LinkedIn under her name Christine Ramirez.

            Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

            47 min
          • Episode 26: Johnny Sheeley (Fanatics)

            In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Johnny talk about:

            • The location of rachel's socks
            • Career growth via dissatisfaction
            • Johnny's path through tech-art school, bus driving, web advertising, high-end apparel customer experiences...and the common thread of communication
            • The complexity of the hardware-sofware interchange
            • MEEP MEEP! And other tales of brute-forcing things
            • Why an interpretive dance is the last thing Johnny would ever want to do
            • Why providing IT services for a non-technical org is harder than it looks
            • Managing one's ratio of dedication to good work-life balance, and seeing it more clearly from the manager vs individual contributor perspective
            • Kendall's evil overlord tendencies
            • The stress of over-accountability vs authority
            • Dispassionate leadership and when it's right to focus on the outcomes only
            • Johnny's enjoyment of recreational falling down and cookie baking
            • How obvious it is that Kendall has never cooked anything
            • The butter and sugar of leadership: giving a shit about people

              • You can find Johnny on Twitter at @johnny_sheeley

              Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

              46 min
            • Episode 25: Get to know your host--Kendall "not the Jenner" Miller (ReactiveOps)

              In this episode, rachel and Kendall talk about:

              • Yet another life ruined by PHP
              • Being a coder by 5th grade and seeing a terrible future for himself by 10th grade
              • Getting management experience young and moving to China
              • Addressing cross-cultural communication difficulties when delivering and receiving feedback
              • The weird and mixed feels around selling the company and no longer being CEO
              • Strategies for transferring the trust your team has for you to new leadership
              • How leaders can have both major skills and shocking shortcomings
              • Realizing that as a leader, your job is not the deliverable, your job is the people
              • When Kendall thinks it's necessary to tell one's boss they need to leave
              • Walking in and assuming you know how to fix something without asking questions
              • The power of being widely-networked and what it brings to leadership
              • What it means to be an out-of-practice extrovert
              • Doing this podcast so he can talk to people who intimidate him
              • How having authority is like keeping control over your large vehicle
              • What working for religious organizations/family businesses can be like
              • Making time to smoke pipes and write things down

                • You can find Kendall on the internets at this fine podcast :) and on twitter as @blatanterror

                Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

                49 min
              • Episode 24: Dana Jones (Abstract)

                In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Dana talk about:

                • Becoming a coder via editing books about programming
                • Missing being able to be more focused on your own work
                • Kendall's near-miss at preempting Google's success
                • The value of 360 feedback in a review process
                • Squad goals (I had to say it)
                • JIRA hate
                • The need to walk a line between uncritical approval of decisions from higher-ups and allowing for disgruntlement in a safe space to maintain credibility
                • Dana's book recommendation: "Thanks For The Feedback" about receiving feedback
                • The unnecessary anxiety of project time estimation and productivity metrics
                • Getting your leadership experience outside the workplace first
                • Normalizing failure
                • Firing your kids :)
                • When academia doesn't match reality
                • How great the sound insulation is at Kendall's house
                • The difficulties of co-leadership

                  • You can find Dana on all the internets as @danabrit

                  Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

                  50 min
                • Episode 23: Kate Taggart (Hashicorp)

                  In this episode, Kendall, rachel, and Kate talk about:

                  • Bailing on tech at the get-go...
                  • ...And getting back again in to be the change you want to see
                  • Strategies for teambuilding for remote teams
                  • Understanding the weight of your voice as a leader
                  • How formal training isn't always necessary
                  • Whether it's possible to maintain a company's culture through rapid growth
                  • Interview logistics for big hiring pushes
                  • Code review for your review paperwork
                  • Yet another time when rachel is wrong about our guest being introverted vs extroverted
                  • What ethical authority looks like
                  • Learning to work within the management/corporate ecosystem without letting it eat you
                  • Approaches to dealing with frustration with your teammates
                  • Being put on the spot with new music recommendations
                  • Bringing a ukulele to work!

                    • You can find Kate on twitter at @qkate :)

                    Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

                    42 min
                  • Episode 22: Christina Noren (CloudBees)

                    In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Christina talk about:

                    • Being born fully-formed from the head of the executive suite (or not)
                    • Enjoying enabling makers and doers
                    • Iterating through trials by fire
                    • Understanding the build-vs-buy dynamic and why open source tools matter
                    • Our first official dirty secret!
                    • The particular foibles of product management
                    • Explicitly re-processing past events to learn more from them
                    • Tactics for managing impostor syndrome
                    • Leaning on written communication when your colleagues are distributed
                    • The classic tensions between product management and engineering
                    • The role of product management in selling the vision to engineering
                    • Not being able to dabble
                    • Funding the cycle of art projects and the joy of the plan

                      • You can find Christina via her initials most places, including cfrln on twitter

                      Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

                      47 min
                    • Episode 21: Silvia Botros (Twilio-Sendgrid)

                      In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Silvia talk about:

                      • How nobody ever reads documentation beforehand
                      • The sad state of education
                      • What terrible handwriting might offer us in terms of improving our communication habits
                      • rachel's inability to remember the term "career ladder"
                      • The importance of identifying and codifying hierarchies as your flat org begins to grow
                      • Discovering the Individual Contributor leadership track
                      • What leadership means for the Principal Engineer and how this varies at scale
                      • The value of providing historical context for your colleagues
                      • Dudes on Twitter, an eternal plague etc
                      • Becoming comfortable about delegation as a method of self-preservation
                      • Making the choice to remain an Individual Contributor
                      • ...and realizing you're a leader anyway
                      • Wielding authority for good, not judgement of errors
                      • Transferring incident response skills to one's home life
                      • Why leadership does not equal management

                        • You can find Silvia on twitter as @dbsmasher

                        You can find Silvia's recent blog post here: https://blog.dbsmasher.com/2019/01/28/on-being-a-principal-engineer.html

                        Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

                        45 min

                      About Authority Issues

                      From the publisher's feed

                      Welcome to Authority Issues, a podcast about leadership, management, and competitive prescription writing.