leadership
When you're welcoming a new team member, make it easy for them to quickly get up to speed. It's tempting to think that you are so busy that you don't have time to welcome them well, but that's a high-risk maneuver, as
leadership
Interviewing candidates effectively is so hard -- you only get a few hours to determine if this person has the right skills, experience, temperament, cultural alignment, leadership style, etc. to fit into this specific role in your organization. A few tips about structuring the interview event: * Schedule sufficient time, such
lessons-learned
It's easy to look at email as something that you have to keep up with, so you can get back to work, but so much actual work gets done in email (and so much potential working time is taken away by email wrangling). If you think about emails
leadership
Skip-level 1-on-1s are the concept of you, as a leader of multiple teams, of meeting directly with people who report to people who report to you. This is sometimes a very delicate topic, because you may make your direct reports, or the people you're meeting with (who work
leadership
Fundamental, tactical skills like email management, schedule/calendar management, and making documents and presentations are sometimes overlooked by leaders when they consider how to keep their teams aligned. If things aren't running smoothly, there's value in reflecting on these fundamentals, both for yourself (Are these tactical,
lessons-learned
Here are some random concepts/frameworks for great time management: 1. Build your own personal productivity system so that you keep track of action items/tasks/to dos/ongoing responsibilities/etc. 1. Consider investing time in reading books like David Allen's Getting Things Done, which walks through some
leadership
As a leader, it's easy to get sucked into filling your days with meetings focused on the work, and not investing time in taking care of your people. Don't let this happen -- it reminds me of the personal finance concept of "Pay yourself first&
leadership
The difference between watching 5 year olds and professionals play soccer is a powerful illustration of what organizations feel like as they mature -- early startups tend to have people swarm every issue, like little kids playing "magnet ball", while mature organizations has clear responsibilities and expectations. I
leadership
Moving up the org chart from individual contributor to team leader, to more senior management jobs, and eventually into senior leadership (executive leadership) isn't trivial. Most people don't get a lot of education or training on how to be great leaders and managers. As you move
miscellaneous
I used to help my grandfather work on old cars -- he was a telecommunications engineer who supported NASA on the Apollo missions, who could quickly learn how to take apart, and put back together pretty much anything. When my father was in college, he had an old beat up
leadership
You've heard people say that multi-tasking is inefficient, and everyone thinks they're good at it, but they're really not. That's a powerful concept to remember, as you try to work through your day, but many people don't try to influence
agile
When you're planning to launch a big new program (or other big effort) at work, it's valuable to step back and clarify, very succinctly the purpose and scope of this new thing. It's easy early on when planning a big new thing to think