Here's a list of resources I have personally found helpful. I include the Blinkist link if I can (Cliffnotes for management books) because books are long and who has time?
- Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle (book)
- Excellent book for women/femmes who are exhausted by the demands of work, home, and society. Discusses tools to close the stress cycle and how the game is rigged
- It doesn't have to be crazy at work (book)
- Being "busy" is not usually a good thing these days
- Panda Planner (tool)
- Physical day planner that helps balance priorities with mental health
- Finance for Designers (article)
- Business 101 for designers and engineers to help understand why revenue/sales folks may make the requests they do and how to work with your revenue partners instead of against them
Inclusivity (more found on my website)
- How to grow emotionally intelligent engineering teams (talk)
- The Psychological Toll of Being the Only Woman of Color at Work (article)
- Self-explanatory description of what it's like to be the only woman of color at work and resources for help
- When Black Women Go From Office Pet to Office Threat (article)
- First your boss loves you, then they dislike you. Here’s how Black women can manage the icy transition.
- Why women and people of color fall off the glass cliff (video)
- 10 min video on why women and racially marginalized people in senior leadership are often set up to fail and the snowball effect it has on the business
- Make Better Decisions by Challenging Your Expectations (article)
- Using the BIAS framework (behavior, information, analysis, structure) to analyze your biases and make a good decision
- The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision... (article)
- One of the Harvard Business Review's top articles, a checklist of 12 questions that any leader should ask before making a big decision
- Inspired (book)
- How to be a great product manager
- Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (article)
- Defines a good product manager as a CEO of their product area and defines a bad one
- 10 Expert Tips for Effective and Meaningful One-on-One Meetings (article)
- An article summery of a Twitter chat I participated in to discuss how to have effective 1:1 meetings
- 1:1 GitHub Actions (tools)
- @sophshep's 1:1 repos and automation tools via Actions
- The Culture Code (book)
- How to build a team that works together
- Difficult Conversations (book)
- Giving tough feedback and having hard conversations is part of the job. Here's how to do it well
- Dream Teams (book)
- How to build teams that actually work together
- Emotional Agility (article)
- Article on how leaders can embrace emotions and recognize that emotions and reactions shouldn't be the same. Especially important for those high-tension conversations! TED talk link is here.
- Goal setting for managers (lightning talk)
- Quick lightning talk on how to structure goals for someone who doesn't quite know what they want to do yet
- Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions (article)
- Index on 6 different areas that can help you prevent making a cultural faux pas. Areas include: Power Distance Index (high versus low), Individualism Versus Collectivism, Masculinity Versus Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance Index (high versus low), Long- Versus Short-Term Orientation, Indulgence Versus Restraint
- How to avoid the growing pains of communicating at scale (article)
- Great actionable advice on pitfalls to avoid when growing and trying to communicate change
- How to have meetings that don't suck (as much) (article by me)
- Tips and tricks on how to run more effective meetings
- How to set goals with your engineers that don't totally suck (article)
- My thoughts and structure on how to have effective goals and useful 1:1s
- How to (slowly) build trust with your staff engineers (article)
- Great list of questions to add to your 1:1s with your staff engineers
- Interview with Danielle Leong: Ask vs Guess culture (podcast)
- Podcast that I'm on discussing how to improve psychological safety and emotional intelligence on your teams
- It's Time to Fine-Tune Performance Management (podcast with transcript)
- You can always tell when a company implements a bonus structure because their products no longer make sense. Great podcast (with transcript!) on fine tuning performance reviews to incentivize collaboration and actually doing what's right for the customer
- Kübler-Ross Challenge Curve (diagram)
- Creators of the 5 stages of grief, this outlines the 7 stages of dealing with organizational change
- Leading with Heart (book)
- ⭐ One of my favorite leadership books, this book discusses how to set a good example by leading with empathy and making sure you aren't causing your own organizational problems by taking care of your base needs first
- Manager's Path (book)
- Excellent book on the various different levels of management. Something I come back to at each level of my career
- Model, Document, Share (article)
- How to lead without explicit power through modeling behavior you want to see, documenting best practices, and sharing
- Multipliers (book)
- Amplify your impact by making other people better so you can do other things
- Netflix's Pivot to Growing Teams Internally (podcast)
- Great podcast on how to grow talent internally because hiring "the best" can only take you so far. You need to also be able to grow the best internally
- Radical Candor (book)
- Giving people feedback is a kindness! Make sure you do it regularly and honestly
- Remote manager toolkit (tool)
- @alexwitherspoon's fantastic resource on remote manager tools
- Resilient Management (book)
- Excellent book for managers looking to improve their team processes, how to handle tough conversations, and 1:1s. Has actionable templates and is a reasonable length!
- The invisible song of engineering leadership (article)
- When technicality isn't enough to quantify what makes a good leader
- The Ultimate Guide to Successful Meetings (aricle)
- How to have successful meetings
- Three crucial skills that leaders must develop to become executives (article)
- How soft skills become crucial at the higher levels of leadership
- Toto Wolff and the Mercedes Formula One Team (case study)
- Harvard Business School case study on the leadership skills of Toto Wolff and the Mercedes F1 team. High emphasis on people management and maintaining excellence. Definitely recommend checking out the team values and ethos in the exhibits at the end
- Transitioning to Meta-Management (article)
- Article describing the changes going from line management to managing managers
- Tribal Leadership (book)
- Describing the 5 stages of a company's culture from toxic ("my life sucks and I can't do anything about it") to efficient and aspirational ("we are great and we are working towards a noble goal")
- ‘Ugh fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task (article)
- Check in on your reports on what they're avoiding as well as what they're doing
- What We Say Matters (book)
- We are still doing phrasing and it's important. Communication is so important as a manager
- You're not just a manager, you're also a boss (article)
- Article on keeping power dynamics at the front of your mind as your power and influence grows. (CW: discusses insurrection attempt at the US Capital on Jan 6, 2021)
- Joining a Startup for the First Time? 30 Actionable Tips From Folks Who've Been There (article)
- Great tips on what to do in your first startup
- An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need beyond coding (article)
- A listicle of great leadership and communication skills needed beyond coding
- Are You Sabotaging Your Career By Being Perceived as a Doer and Not a Leader? (article)
- Article helpful particularly for staff engineers or staff hopefuls who are struggling to move from doing the work to unblocking people and becoming a leader
- Becoming a Better Writer in Tech (article)
- Writing is a crucial part of growing your career. Being a clear and crisp communicator helps in all aspects of you job. Great article with tools and tips on how to become a better writer
- High Bit-rate People (article)
- How to be more concise with communication and transfer more information in fewer words
- Manager's Path (book)
- Highly recommend the section on how to be a tech lead
- Not all engineering leaders are managers (article)
- Stop pushing leaders into management if it doesn't suit them. This article discusses how to encourage ICs into a parallel technical track and measuring strategy, execution, and influence.
- Presenting to executives (video)
- This talk presents some concrete strategies for planning your presentation, preparing the attendees, handling unexpected questions, going down rabbit holes, driving the attendees to a decision (if that is your goal), and following up afterward.
- Reasons to step into a leadership role (or not) (article)
- Are you interested in becoming a manager or stepping into a leadership role? What's driving you? Check out this great resource and make sure you're doing it for the right reasons
- The reality of being a principal engineer (article)
- What's it really like to be a principal engineer? Discussing the influence needed to maintain a principal engineer position, rather than focusing on the code
- Staff archetypes (article)
- Outlining the different types of staff engineers
- Linear Method for building software (process)
- Concise way of organizing work, being flexible, and focusing on alignment
- Plucky 1:1 cards (tool)
- Deck of cards with questions to ask in 1:1s to inspire deeper conversation around individuals, teams, and organizations
- Reader Mode (chrome extension)
- Chrome extension to help make raeding longform articles easier. Includes dark mode, dyslexia fonts, and a focus ruler
- Remote manager toolkit (tool)
- @alexwitherspoon's templates, examples, and things that could be downloaded, cloned, forked and used to manage remote teams with elements of real-time and asynchronous approaches and the Git change control system.
- Farsighted (book)
- How to make better decisions
- No Hard Feelings (book)
- Feelings are hard but they are a normal part of life. Time to stop fighting it.