Lara Hogan, Management Coach and Trainer
Almost everybody I know is doing some math on longevity in their current role. Whether it’s moral math (should I go work for a place that’s doing more good in the world, despite it being less money?), retirement math (can I go all-in at an AI corp and retire early?) or figuring out a backup plan (our jobs are all going away, have you heard?), it can feel near-impossible to make decisions about…
(This is an updated version of a post I first wrote in 2017 . Given everything happening in tech today, it felt worth dusting off.) The question “Why can’t they just…” has been a common refrain I’ve heard throughout my career. “Why can’t they just X” is, at its core, a great question—“why can’t they just find spending cuts elsewhere?” or “why can’t they just tell us what the technical strategy…
Vicarious learning is a real thing: we absorb skills and knowledge by watching others, hearing about their mistakes, seeing what worked. This is why postmortems are such a great tool for building context, and seeing how other engineers problem-solve. I’ve been thinking about vicarious learning a lot lately, specifically about how engineers are learning to use AI. There’s no shortage of AI content…
Many of us are feeling stuck . We’re managing through crisis after crisis , and we’re watching our leaders and our teammates burn out and not be their best selves. I don’t know anybody who’s thriving right now. Day-to-day, you’re trying to make at least a tiny bit of difference. I see it! You’re working to help people get promoted, you’re running standups to make sure folks have what they need,…
I’ve been working with the rad team at Fly.io for the past few months as a fractional VPE, mainly focusing on management-y and culture stuff as the team grows. One of the things I really dig about Fly.io’s company culture is how teammates use their internal forum for sharing questions about work, project progress updates, oncall recaps, and other stuff that I’ve traditionally seen live (and die)…
We face decisions every single day, big and small. Sometimes those decisions have tradeoffs that feel impossible to decide between, which naturally will feel particularly hard to settle on. For example, let’s say you’ve been struggling to enjoy your current role at work, and you’re ready to make a decision about how to address that. You’re feeling some stress about the volume of work you need to…
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were…
“What we recognize is what we reward.” I first heard someone say this in 2013. My leadership team was deep in a heated discussion about how to get more engineers to consider mobile web when building out new features. An absolute given now, it wasn’t then. At my organization, I was simultaneously trying to convince my fellow managers to think about how their new features might work on mobile…
Congrats, you’ve made it through your first 2 months as a new hire in a leadership role! You’re in the home stretch of this initial season. You took advantage of the first 30 days in the role to build trust by employing “sponge mode.” You asked lots of questions, genuinely listened to your teammates’ answers, and avoided enacting any sweeping, permanent changes to the way work gets done. Then you…
Woohoo, you’ve made it through the first 30 days in your new leadership role, and you didn’t change a thing! Congrats—you’ve been building trust by soaking in information and helping folks on your team feel heard and seen. At this stage, you now have some ideas for how your teams accomplish and communicate their work, what the roadmap looks like, how performance is assessed, and a number of other…