Manage up without getting (too) salty about it

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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,...