I wrote this article on Medium a while back called the “Software Manager Minimum”. At the time, I was writing about the bare minimum you need to be doing as a manager and leader on a software team in order to keep your team moving forward. In this I boiled it down to three questions you should always be asking yourself on a daily basis; What’s the Pulse of the team? How are we doing? …
It’s easy to do the things that don’t challenge you, don’t push you, don’t force you to rethink what you are doing, and give you that boost of what you are good at. It’s much harder to realize you’re not good at everything, that one thing you are struggling with, you are struggling with for a reason because it’s not easy. That “thing” you working on, you might be the only one working on it…
This is always going to happen, someone will not always agree with what you are saying, what you are proposing, what you know to be the right path based on experience and implementation, or maybe just all the work you’ve put into it. You could be the greatest expert in the room and they still won’t listen to you (Even when they say teach us). You might have the whole room on board except for…
You might have heard this phrased another way – “Reading between the Lines” – but what we’re asking you to do is listen for what is happening between the words. Are you not getting what is being asked of you? Are you asking for confirmation that you understood their issue? Are you arguing for what you want vs what they need? Listening between the words is figuring out the context, where the information is coming…
In Managing Tasks, it was all about your work but what about when you are having to manage other people’s work? What do you do when you are responsible for someone else’s work but you’re not the one that is doing it? What do you then? We all lay out our work differently but when I’m responsible for what someone else is delivering the requirements are still the same; Do I understand what you have written? …