One of the hardest parts of any job is working with difficult people. No matter how much we wish they would just change and make our lives easier, that’s just not the most effective strategy for getting things done in the face of a difficult coworker. Last time, we tackled handling a bad boss. This [...]
One of the hardest parts of any job is working with difficult people. No matter what your assignment, if there are other people who make it hard for you to get your work done or who make you feel unhappy, unsupported, or misunderstood while you’re doing your work, it can turn going to the office [...]
Meetings suck – my tips to make your meetings better (or at least less worse) [not sure that sentence even makes sense, but I liked the ring of it] I hate meetings. I wish I didn’t talk as much as I did. I waste too much time. And these are all things I [...]
Becoming a Manager As I’ve said before on this blog: when I started my career, it was never my intention to become a manager. I always wanted to be a software engineer (and one day an architect or principal engineer), and I worked really hard to deepened my technical knowledge as I possibly could. I [...]
Every year I become a better manager. As time goes I get better and better (just like a great bottle of wine). As I reflect on my growth, one of the more shocking lessons was learning to how it important it was to build relationships with my peers. In big companies, your performance is often calibrated [...]
Delegating: Are You Ignoring This Key To Success? In this week’s issue of the Technology Leadership Newsletter, a particular article from the Harvard Business Review caught my attention: “More Direct Reports Make Life Easier”. This article was interesting to me because I am little enamored with the concept of non-hierarchical leadership. I love the [...]
Delivering Bad News One of the hardest things about being a manager is when you have to tell others something they don’t want to hear. It never gets easier to tell someone they’re not performing up to standards, or to tell a whole team that their project they’ve spent so many hours on is now going [...]
Who doesn’t want recognition for their hard work and contributions? Early in my career I wanted to believe that if you worked hard, and added value, that you would be rewarded. I wanted to believe in the utopian ideal that hard work, discipline, and contributions were the fuel that propelled you up the [...]
This post is special because it stems from a question I received via email. I think it is a great question because in tech it is very easy to meet the smart programmer that is a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Performance is bracketed to 2 major categories, those of skill and those of behavior (one [...]