Lessons Learned Fast

Create clear vision

Create Core Values

How and why your team does things

Explain Your Why

Communicate Early & Often

Connect the Dots

Open Doors of Communication

Notable Leadership Resources

• 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
• Servant Leadership
• Radical Candor

21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

John C. Maxwell

Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf - 1970 essay "The Servant as a Leader."

Servant first - focusing on the needs of others before your own.

Guiding Principles

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Self-awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of people
10. Building community

Radical Candor

Kim Scott

Common Threads

• Humility
• Self-awareness
• Influence over authority
• Intuition & learned experience
• Importance of growth and autonomy

Strike a Balance in Content You Read

Nothing will teach you better than experience, but having an understanding as scenarios approach you will help.

Building a Team

Pragmatic Interview Process

• Why do they want the job?
• What are they hoping to get out of the job?
• How do they handle conflict?
• How do they solve hard problems?

Culture Add > Culture Fit

Optimize Onboarding Process

• Equipment & Tools?
• Appropriate Access
• Personnel introductions
• Documentation of Tribal Knowledge
• Get personnel as autonomously
  operational as soon as possible.

"It's better to have a hole in your team than an asshole in your team!"

Dan Jacobs

Resist Homogeneity

Understand Motivations

Be Ready for Team Conflict

Beware of value-shaming & toxic positivity

Building Trust

Trust is Hard to Build and Easy to Break

Establish Lines of Communication

Make it clear for how your team can approach you, provide multiple methods.

Get Comfortable Explaining Your Thought Process

"Open Calendar" Policy

In a remote world, open calendar is the new open door policy.

Getting Feedback

You must take feedback AND act on it when possible

Giving Feedback

Tailor feedback method to the individual

Set Your Team Up for Success

• Clear expectations
• Clear deliverables
• Clear process

Don't Piss Off Your Engineers

• Process to document their status without asking
• Push back against priority switching
• Help guard team against distractions
• Get buy-in for deadlines & deliverables

Constant Introspection

• Is my ego playing into this?
• Am I letting my values influence my team?
• What level of responsibility did I have in this?

Understand Job Trauma is Real

Building Growth Culture

Balance Servant Leadership

Know when not to be a "snowplow" parent

Prioritize Allowing Autonomy

Don't Shy Away From Hard Conversations

Address issues as they arise, reports should not hear negative feedback for the first time in reviews or upon disciplinary action

Praise in Public, Criticize in Private

Know There Are Some Battles You Cannot Win