Decoding Leadership

We discuss the inevitable challenge of being the bottleneck and how to get yourself out of this situation, mostly by growing and training your team. Learn approaches such as

I also share

These are all important techniques for creating teams that can operate more autonomously!

One of the most important concepts in developing a strong organization is "organizational work". I describe the concept, how you can use it to drive lasting improvements in your organization, and how you can use it to build strong, collaborative leadership teams.

Let's talk about macho and bro-ish leadership culture! Macho cultures often exhibit aggressive and sometimes sexist behavior. While risk-taking and aggressive behavior isn't uniformly bad, macho culture can result in groupthink and result in poor decision-making. And it can drive away talent. We explore why these cultures emerge, often due to stereotyped views of leadership, and share techniques for navigating them. 

We discuss two related topics: fan out work and managing bottleneck teams. We first delve into fan out work, its causes, examples, and some of the problems it causes. We discuss a couple of approaches to reduce the impact of fan out work, such as having teams complete their own fan out work, and setting limits on such projects. 

We then discuss bottleneck teams. Every organization has teams that suffer as they support the most critical aspects of the business. We discuss common issues like stakeholder bullying. And we offer some solutions such as adopting self-service models, adding rotation roles, and redefining the responsibilities of the team. 

The format for this episode is an experiment -- I'm not interviewing anyone else!

John Hyland is an expert on making early career engineers successful. They led up the Ignite program at New Relic, which was an incredibly innovative program that was so good they expanded it to more senior levels. They go into some detail about how they set up and adapted the program. They also give lots of advice on hiring for both early career and later career engineers. 

After that, we did a retrospective on deconstructing a Ruby monolith at New Relic. It was a large, complicated project, and some parts of it didn't go as well as we expected. We dug into what we could learn from that that applies to all large, complex software projects. 

Finally, John brings up the Preventable Problems Paradox, and we discuss how to incentivize better behavior at companies besides just firefighting.

In this episode of Decoding Leadership, Jade sits down with experienced engineering leader Jason Poole to discuss the ins and outs of building strong partnerships between product, engineering, and design. Jason shares his insights on:

Nadya is an accomplished product leader and chief product officer. I've always been impressed with how she has navigated getting large groups of people on the same page. And she's really good at aligning executives. She gives us some tips for getting better at that, and talks through her approach to radical candor, protecting teams, and growing the people on her team.

Keizan Shaffer talks through how he thinks about mentorship. He talks about the importance of surfacing your thinking and sharing your mental models, how mentorship, teaching, coaching, and sponsorship are different. And he shares some career advice that his mentors have found useful. He also talks about Conway's law, and some tips for managing reorgs successfully.

Alexa Stefanko led one of the most dramatic improvements in a team I've seen. We talk about a set of changes we introduced at Gremlin, including the Single Threaded Owner model, the introduction of product metrics, and setting up an "API" between local teams and senior leadership. Alexa also talks about her move to being a director, the differences between medical and tech leadership, and how animal training has influenced (and not influenced) her approach with people.