Stop. Grab a pencil and write down the first and last names of your past three managers. Stare at those names for a bit and re-live those months or years of reporting to this person. I want your off-the-cuff opinion about each one. My guess is your opinion falls into one of the three buckets:… more
In your quiver of management skills, you’ve got a couple of powerful arrows. There’s the annual review where you take the time to really explain, in detail, what a given employee needs to do to grow. That’s huge. That can be life changing. That’s a big arrow. How about the layoff? That’s when you get… more
At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people — this is the moment when, if you’re an early employee, that you first see someone in he hallway that you do not recognize. This is troubling to you because,… more
As already discussed, Managers are not evil. They’re often just stuck in translation hell where they need to say one thing in one way to one team and say the EXACT same thing to another team in a different way. This constant verbal tapdancing looks sketchy to you, the Average Joe, and you start to… more
You’ve been here… You get a random email from your boss that you need to meet with him urgently at some odd hour of the day. You sit staring at the email, wondering what could be up. No rumors of layoffs are in the air… the company is hitting it’s number this quarter. You don’t… more
I build software for a living. I started out in quality assurance in the 80s and now I’m responsible for a reasonably large engineering organization tasked with developing four very different products. This week, the team sat down with the executives at the company and basically asked for several million dollars to finance the development… more
