Interesting Readings #3
Another week is over! Time to relax and enjoy the sunny weather here in London.
I will be travelling to visit my family in Apulia by the end of next week, but I will keep reading and sharing with you all.
Personal & Wellbeing
Stop trying to change (Watch video)
People don’t change, people grow.
We should focus on becoming self-aware: identifying patterns in our being.
Once we recognise them and understand their costs, we also need to use the lens of appreciation. While we do that, we can become a better version of ourselves. In other words, we grow.
For example, Kaley mentions being a perfectionist. The cost of that is the constant inner voice saying “It is not good enough“. That trigger you thinking, that you should change. But what do you appreciate about that pattern? How can you leverage that?
Grow create new experience and perspective.
Grow doesn’t happen overnight.
It takes time and it is subtle to notice.
When we receive feedback, often it’s about change
Sometimes it is like asking a dog to be a cat
Please avoid using “should” when giving feedback as it triggers a shame cycle
Bad Habits Holding You Back ( Read more )
So many bad habits referenced by Sahil.
We all have some of these. We may have developed some strategies around them.
The main ones for me are procrastination, comparison traps, and focusing on the urgent.
My strategy to overcome procrastination and focus on the urgent is building habits.
I have been doing that in my personal life and my professional life.
Something simple as a check-in with yourself 2-3 times a day, can help make progress.
I touched on distractions already two weeks ago (link)
Finally, Splitting things into smaller chunks is still relevant for a manager. We often only get 20-30min slots for doing things. Dividing up your tasks into smaller pieces can give you a sense of achievement and fulfilment. And that can enable strategic work to see the light!
There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Extraordinary success is simply the byproduct of a large volume of ordinary actions. The quality of our daily habits governs the ultimate quality of our long-term outcomes.
What are yours? What strategies have you implemented to overcome them?
People & Teams
Inspirational quotes
Diversity is a fact
Equity is a choice
Inclusion is an action
Belonging in an outcome ( Arthur Chan )
The Power of Perception (Read more)
We see reality unfolding through the lens of our experience.
Very often, things are not what they are. So it is important to keep an open stance towards other people's situations.
The reality is that all we see is the tip of the iceberg. As someone empathetic, it came more naturally to me to accept that. Yet it still took time to undo lots of the judgemental habits I had developed growing up.
Insight #1: When perception changes, emotion and behaviours change automatically.
Insight #2: When we understand what perception is, we understand the source of our emotions and motivations and behaviour.
Insight #3: The better we understand the progression, the quicker we can sort out our emotional and motivational lives.
Do something, so we can change (Read more)
Some decisions should be easier to take as they are reversible (two-way door decisions). Teams should try things out and experiment, but sometimes we hesitate. This article is a good reminder that most of our decisions are reversible. Sometimes to see improvements all we have to do is to give it a go. If it doesn’t work, at least we have learnt something and we can do something else.
These choices can be iterated, refined, re-evaluated. We learn from our first attempt, however naive. Two-way door decisions don’t require in-depth analysis or attempts to form consensus, so they can be made quickly and efficiently, or often delegated.
Turbulent time call for adaptive leadership (Read more)
Using our strengths as leverage is important. As leaders though, we can only be successful if we adapt to the specific circumstances.
I lean more towards servant leadership, but that doesn’t work all the time.
Sometimes you have to make the call quickly.
Last year for example we were growing our department at speed. We had to create 2 new teams. Hiring the engineers took less time, but hiring the people to lead the teams was harder.
On top of that one of our leaders was leaving. We hired the existing teams until we couldn’t go forward anymore.
At that point, I had to embrace a more directive approach. The time was running out and there was greater risk in delaying the decision. So I split a team in 2 and work out the best lineup. I was the person with more information for doing that.
The way to best align yourself to support your co-workers and manage their expectations is to be keenly aware of your operating context, and to self-reflect deeply.
Awareness is your ability to judge what your team needs from you to accomplish a goal or task at hand, and adapt your style accordingly
Truly exceptional leaders create an environment where feedback is a rich, bi-directional, and high-bandwidth component of the overall organisational operating system.
Do not be any one thing or any one type of leader. Be the leader your company needs.
Delivery and Technology
Enhancing Your "Definition of Done" Can Improve Your Minimum Viable Architecture(Read more)
I believe teams with explicit “rules“, work best. The best moment to discuss and document with your team is the norming phase*. One of the classic “ways of working” discussion goes around the definition of done.
The main idea is that everyone should know the criteria to promote our work to production.
Making that obvious to everyone, can avoid frustration and not productive discussions that can lower the morale of the team.
I find that including architecture, should increase the sustainability of our applications.
Minimum Viable Architecture is the smallest set of architectural decisions necessary to ensure the sustainability of the solution
Modern software architecture has evolved into a continual flow of decisions that are revisited continuously. A Definition of Done, extended with architectural concerns, helps teams to continually examine and validate, or reject, their architectural decisions, preventing unhealthy architectural technical debt from accumulating
Thinking about PR review (Read more)
Pull Request reviews are a central part of our work in technology.
Our work is not only divide & conquer, we do need to integrate and there is a cost for integration.
PR workflows are often observed with regard to team productivity. Kent Beck, invites you to reflect/experiment on PR and check the incentives we are providing to our teams.
Any team flow we choose works in a system & that system creates incentives. Choose the team flow that creates the incentives you want & avoid the perverse incentives you want to avoid.
Pick the style of review that matches your context. Invent a new one if necessary. Don’t just copy the open source pull request model just cause. Think. Experiment. Share.
I will come back with more readings next week and I will resume my book mini-series!
Please do let me know what topics were more interesting for you.
Have a great weekend!